A Good Day in Godric's Hollow
by Stanrick
Summary: On his way home a man whose name can hardly be called a mystery around these parts encounters three people at three very different stages in their lives, his own in many ways connected to each of them. All the paths he treads, however, always and without exception lead him back to one fixed point: the place where he belongs, the place he calls home.
1. Part I

**Disclaimer:** Harry Potter belongs to that crazy billionaire woman. I might be crazy, but I'm definitely not a billionaire. And this noncommercial piece of fan fiction is unlikely to change anything about that. Which, come to think of it, sucks.

 **Introduction:** Hullo. Yes, I'm still here, occasionally coming back to the mountain... hill... heap of unfinished Potter-related writings stuck in my Intel-powered typewriter with the whole-hearted and half-assed intention of finishing some more of those glaringly incomplete pieces that over the years have kept teasing me with their... glaring incompleteness. Unsurprisingly, this story is not one of them and was in fact started from scratch just earlier this year, whereas other stories of mine have been desperately awaiting their completion since around 2013. Alas, life was never meant to be fair.

The story before you is comprised of four scenes and was not intended to be separated into chapters. While I still prefer to see it as one continuous narration, faced with its relentlessly increasing length I eventually decided to split it into two parts for the sake of accessibility or readability or some such bility. Since scenes 1-3 together roughly equal scene 4 in length, it at least works out rather neatly like that.

Building on the canonical timeline, as I usually prefer to do, this story unintentionally ended up taking place in the spring of 2018. So it could have briefly been an authentic present tense sort of deal, were I not the lazy bum I undeniably am. This missed opportunity shall make a fine addition to my collection.

But enough about me and my bum. What have you guys been up to? Any of my usual suspects still around after all this time? Is there _anyone_ still around? Hello? Hello-hooo?

Either way, here's something to read. Hope you like it. Bummer if you don't.

* * *

 **A Good Day in**

 **Godric's Hollow**

•

 _Little darling, it's been a long cold lonely winter  
Little darling, it feels like years since it's been here  
Here comes the sun  
Here comes the sun, and I say  
It's all right..._

•

 **1**

Spring had finally blossomed. The remnant traces of winter's last stand had melted away almost two months ago, but the stubborn old gods of Albion had been wontedly reluctant to let the sun's first kiss touch the rolling hills and dormant meadows of Somerset. Yet after weeks of harsh winds and unceasing rain the leaden curtain had been lifted and at last the perpetually overcast sky had opened up, revealing a vibrant azure tapestry speckled with cumulus cotton balls, and in verdant lands underneath the vast firmament flower, beast and human alike were at once reawakened from their hibernal slumber.

The flowers, with their deceptive apathy, were in all colors known to man vying for the best spot in the sun's golden caress and the attention of busily buzzing and flamboyantly fluttering pollinators. The beasts were quick to pick up the very same game played merely with a slightly different set of tools, and mating calls from innumerable eager chests—some feathered and some haired—could be heard in every corner of the country, some of which were generally deemed more pleasant to the human ear than others, despite all of them truthfully speaking of the same unseemly thing.

Mrs Fairholme of Godric's Hollow, oldest and dearest resident of the bucolic village nestled unobtrusively into the countryside, meanwhile, was tending to her garden the very moment the first pastel rays of dawn softly whispered their matutinal greeting. Her famously meticulous garden work—famous, that is, as far as fame could be achieved in so small a community—surely wasn't as rambunctious a business as all that mating kerfuffle going around, but then again, Mrs Fairholme of Godric's Hollow was a solid seventy years detached from that particular part of her life, which at this annual time of ubiquitous courtship made her seem like just about the calmest being in the world.

A far more somber part of this seemingly impenetrable aura of serenity surrounding Elizabeth Fairholme these days was owed to the quiet passing of her husband of seventy-one years, three winters before. While Mrs Fairholme was in no way keen on joining the Hollow's prestigious (albeit entirely unofficial) club of centenarians, as some of the well-meaning townsfolk kept egging her on to do, she certainly didn't intend to idly sit by and wait for nature to take its dawdling course, either. There was still work to be done, after all. Occasionally, lo and behold, even one of her three children—or four, was it?—remembered that she was still _hanging in there,_ as some so tastefully liked to put it.

Her life had largely been lived, and lived well for that matter. That she knew. The brightest light of her life had gone out with her dear Ernest's last breath. That much was clear. She would follow him soon enough, and without fear. But for now there was still some life to be had between her hearth and her garden, some joy to be found between the covers of the books her favorite neighbor kept bringing to her from the other end of town, some peace and quietude to be cherished and grief for her husband to be gracefully carried until death would come calling her to that last uncharted land. So for now she lived.

Her precious tulips were holding Mrs Fairholme's solicitous attention when from behind her she heard a genially spoken greeting with her name following after. She came up from her flowers and turned around, a bit slower than she used to back in the day, but still quite sprightly so for her formidable age. She had recognized the young man from the euphonious sound of his voice alone, of course, but she could also tell from that subtle lilt in it that he was smiling that kind smile of his, and that was always a sight worth seeing.

"Your garden is going to be beautiful this year," the visitor observed with an appraising look around from behind the white garden fence.

"How can you tell?" Mrs Fairholme asked in amusement with one gloved hand on her hip.

"Why, because it's beautiful every year."

The woman more than twice but not quite thrice his age laughed rather heartily at that. "I believe your wife would have to say something about that faulty line of reasoning, my dear lad."

An unburdened chuckle came rolling from the depth of the young man's chest. "That's because my lovely wife has something to say about everything, my dear Mrs Fairholme."

They shared a joyous moment filled with laughter young and old melded into one, and it gently transitioned into a comfortable sort of silence in which only the chirping voices of the birds and the susurration of wind and nearby water persisted. The man's refulgent eyes followed a butterfly fluttering by and remained cast upward at the pristine sky above, squinting against the sunlight and hence unaware of the way Mrs Fairholme was watching him attentively with deep wisdom in her wizened countenance.

After just a little while she asked, "How is she?"

With unaffected delay the man first started nodding his head, then returned his gaze to the elderly lady in front of him, a heartened smile returning to his lips. "Better," he said with one final nod. "A little better every day."

Mrs Fairholme inhaled deeply as she mirrored both his nodding and his smile—firmly, staunchly—and they exchanged a few more pleasantries thereafter that were too superficial to mean much and that meant too much to be entirely superficial before the man eventually went his way with words of parting and wave of hand, and that ever-disorderly yet strangely appealing shock of black hair disappeared step by step down the sloping dirt road and past the old briar patch.

All but imperceptible, the smallest of smiles lingered on Elizabeth Fairholme's life-wrinkled face as she watched him cross the crystalline stream via the stone arch bridge. Half a lifetime ago her husband had rebuilt that very bridge with the help of his brother William, after it had collapsed—having valiantly weathered the wear and tear of more than four centuries—in the fabled summer storm of 1973. Just in that moment, showing once again signs of age and perseverance, it struck Mrs Fairholme as more beautiful than perhaps it had ever been.

Her passing visitor vanished from sight between the cottages on the other side of the stream. He had always been such a fine lad, that young raven-haired man. So fundamentally decent. And sometimes, just now and then in some small way, he reminded her of her dearest Ernest, and with secret memories of her lifelong companion's warmth deep and true in her weary, plucky old heart she went back to her tulips.

Today, it just so seemed, would be a good day in Godric's Hollow.

~•~

 **2**

There were four finely crafted cast iron benches with wooden slat seats placed around the Hollow's rather notable war memorial in town square, which in actuality was less of a square and more of a wobbly sort of circle. In its quaint entirety the open area was barely spacious enough to accommodate the dozen densely packed market stalls that were erected there at the break of dawn every Saturday. Surrounded by many of the township's most essential public venues and amenities—its universally cherished bakery, its splendiferous florist and of course the _Godric Gryffindor Museum of Local and Less Apparent History_ (which Muggles commonly mistook for an exhibition of tall tales and folklore primarily aimed at children), as well as _Finnigan's Wake,_ its finest and coincidentally only pub—it was, befitting of a proper town square, very much the beating heart of the Hollow's booming commerce and social life. Three of the resident Muggles, in their weekly state of immoderate intoxication, once dubbed it the Times Square of England's South West. It didn't catch on.

It was early afternoon on a Friday, but even without the weekly market the mellow spring sun and the faint yet oh so promising scent of freshly baked pies in the air were more than enough to entice the Hollow's denizens into various outside activities. Or at the very least activities that had them leaving their own dwellings in favor of entering some other building of their choice, like aforementioned pub for example. When it came to the right time of day to start drinking there truly was no time like the present, or so Winston Toller, the town's only non-anonymous alcoholic, would have you believe. Indeed, it was quite a busy day in Godric's Hollow, meaning that no fewer than eleven whole people could be seen at all times leisurely going about their business at town square or sauntering past the windows of bookstores and antique shops without much of a concrete purpose in mind, to say nothing of the other handful of chaps bimbling about elsewhere in town.

Right in the very center of all this downright boisterous commotion, on one of the four benches, a small human figure was in stark contrast to the general insouciance going about sitting morosely by himself, all but completely detached from the goings-on around him. Young Niall Scott Ingham held his arms firmly crossed over his small chest, like a shield between the world and himself. His brow was deeply furrowed, his jaw tightly clenched. His red cheeks were glistening moistly in the sunlight: half-smeared residue of tears angrily wiped away not too long ago. He would be ten years old a mere two days from now, and he was no longer a year away from attending Hogwarts.

The boy's sullen eyes absently followed the all too familiar man traversing the square after he appeared from underneath the striped awning of Morwenna's Corner Shoppe with a brown paper bag supported on one angled arm. The man was about to pass the memorial, tilting his head to glance up at the bronze statue on top of the granite plinth engraved with the names of the family sculptured above and all the natives and residents of the Hollow that had been lost in the war of 1998 and the tumultuous years leading up to it. The man's pace slowed, however, and the faint and somewhat absentminded smile on his features dropped the moment he noticed the boy on the bench. His expression turned thoughtful as he came to a halt. When the man proceeded to change direction and approach him, Niall averted his eyes and hastily wiped at his face with the sleeve of his red hoody again.

"Hey, titch," the man greeted him amiably. "What's got you looking like the weekend's over when it's really just beginning? School's out neither for summer nor forever, but at least for a couple of days..."

There was a pause long and inconclusive enough for the man to consider a different approach just when the boy finally spoke up in what for a bundle of near-inexhaustible energy like Niall Scott Ingham was an unusually meek voice. "I'll never be like you," he stated flatly, much to the man's subsequent puzzlement. That fundamentally impotent tone of defeat in the kid's voice instantly had the man reevaluating the severity of the situation. He knelt down, putting his paper bag aside on the ground, and looked intently up at the kid's troubled face. Niall somewhat listlessly glanced at the bag's contents and quickly decided he really wasn't interested in any vegetables right now. Or ever.

The man's voice was gentle when he spoke. "What do you mean?"

The boy sniffled and wiped at his nose with the back of his hand. "I'll never be like you," he repeated in the same dejected monotone. "I'll never be a wizard. Never'll be a Quidditch star. Never'll be a hero."

Confusion remained in the man's increasingly concerned expression. "What are you talking about? How do you—" And then it suddenly dawned on him. Everything became clear in an instant with that brutal blow straight to the gut that tends to deliver life's worst of realizations. He understood. Of course he did. In a small village like Godric's Hollow everybody knew everybody else to some extent, because—often for the better, sometimes maybe not—people actually talked to one another. He knew the Inghams better than most. He had listened to their woes and worries over tea and dinner on more than one occasion. He had tried to assuage them with the usual platitudes, for what else could he have done? And now reality had asserted itself once again in all its uncaring immutability.

When young Niall Ingham's bold blue eyes met his gaze, there was more painful knowledge, more jaded certainty in them than there should ever be found in the eyes of a child. The man knew without a vestige of doubt that what had once been a distant suspicion in the minds of his parents, what had soon turned into a foreboding fear lurking beneath the surface, had now at last materialized like a sinkhole right underneath their orderly lives. And with or without the translucent orbs of fresh tears gathering in those bold blue eyes, the boy's following words only served to make heard what was already known in two aching hearts out there in the Hollow's unevenly circular town square.

"I'm a squib," the not-quite-ten-year-old said with a quivering chin, and behind the man's glasses green eyes were glistening faintly with most genuine sympathy.

"Are you sure about that?" the man asked despite himself, his voice halting—almost cracking halfway through, knowing how pointless a question it was. Somehow he just knew it really was true this time.

The boy nodded his head and looked down at his small hands that lay loosely clasped in his lap. "We went to St Mungo's last week and they did some tests and talked about me a lot. Even Mary's shown first signs of magic, and she's just turned four. So my parents wanted the doctors to take a look at me and they did and then they took my blood with a needle too and today we went back to the hospital and got the results of the tests and I think they didn't want to tell me at first but I wanted to know so they did. They said that I don't have the jeans you need for magic or something and now I'm a squib! A stupid, useless squib!"

The man opened his mouth as if to speak, but saw that it was not yet the right moment. This, it struck him just then, was the first time the boy was getting all of this off his chest, and sometimes that just demanded to be properly done.

"All I ever wanted to be was a wizard hero like you," the boy expectedly continued. "I wanted to go to Hogwarts and learn all the spells and fight the evil wizards and maybe play some Quidditch too with Jonny and now it's all over! It's never even gonna happen! Everybody will laugh at me now because everybody laughs at squibs and my parents hate me and Mary too and she'll think I'm a joke and go to Hogwarts and learn all the spells and what will I do? I'm nothing now! Nothing!"

The man had listened attentively as all this pent-up anger, pain and frustration came pouring out of that desperate young heart in front of him. He could see the chest underneath the boy's folded arms going up and down in the furious rhythm of emotional exertion.

"Do you really believe that?" he softly asked the boy after a moment's careful consideration.

Niall seemed hesitant, a child's weary mind at strife with itself. In the end he merely shrugged his still rather tiny shoulders. The Ingham boy had always leaned towards the scrawny side of physique, no matter how much chocolate cake he practically _inhaled_ at any given opportunity. Much like the man he was talking to had at his age, though rarely he had been permitted to partake of such culinary delights as chocolate cake in the house he had been so blessed to grow up in...

"I might be wrong here," the man mused aloud, "but I've always been under the impression that no person is just a single thing and nothing more than that. So how can you be nothing if I still see the same brave Niall in front of me whose friend I've been so lucky to be for years now? Or are you saying you aren't even my friend anymore?"

"Of course not!" Niall was quick to object, and quite emphatically so. "I'll always be your friend."

"A-ha!" the man vocalized his modest sense of triumph in appropriate moderation. "So then the doctors didn't suddenly turn you into nothing after all..."

"I guess not," the boy allowed with some understandable reluctance. "But I didn't wanna be just anything. I wanted to be special."

"Well, statistically speaking—" the man began at once, then quickly bit his tongue. Suppressing an inopportune smile that was about to sneak its way onto his lips at the thought of how much he sounded like his wife sometimes, he cleared his throat and hastily amended, "Never mind. You _are_ special, titch, whether you're a wizard or not. You think all wizarding folk are special just by virtue of being wizarding folk? Most people in the world aren't even aware they exist, and among themselves very few of them qualify as special, as far as their wand-waggling capabilities are concerned. Between you and me," and he leaned a bit closer, his voice dropping into a surreptitious whisper, "most of them honestly are about as good at casting spells as I am at singing."

That at least got a genuine if short-lived giggle out of the boy, and the man secretly counted that as a success, or at the very least a first glimpse of one, for too soon the fleeting mirth in Niall's eyes was gone again, banished by reemerging despondency.

"But what about you?" he mumbled, arms still crossed and brow again creased in defiance, eyes fixed on a nondescript spot on the ground. "You're special."

"Me?" the man calmly replied. "I was mainly made so very special by this." And he pointed at the statue behind him, the head of the boy swirling up to follow his gesture. "The man who did that? Who took my parents from me and gave me this _special_ mark?" He pointed at the prominent scar on his forehead, partly covered but never quite hidden by wayward strands of hair. "Now _he_ was something else. Truly exceptional, no doubt about it. Gifted like few before him and perhaps none since. Almost without equal. And what did he do with all that extraordinary talent, that immense potential?" The man paused, scrutinizing Niall closely, the boy's mind hard at work behind expectant eyes. "No, titch. That's not who you wanna be. You're better than that. You don't want to hurt anyone. You want to be brave and strong so that you can help those who need you. And that's what makes you special in your own way. A better way."

Niall thought about all of that for a moment, and there seemed to be quite a lot to think about. "So..." he eventually and a bit hesitantly voiced his conflicted thoughts. "So you don't think I'm gonna be useless to everybody now? I don't wanna be like that greasy old janitor at Hogwarts. Isn't that all that squibs are good for?"

The man exhaled a weak sigh, his heart going out to the boy. "First of all, you need to stop thinking of yourself as a squib that way before it turns into a bad habit. Don't let that one thing define who you are or what you can be, and don't obsess over labels like that. There's always a sense of failure in that word, too, and you didn't fail at anything." He gave the boy a moment to absorb this perhaps not entirely unimportant point. "And secondly, not even Mr Filch is useless... although—admittedly—he _does_ tend to be rather greasy. But that's got nothing to do with him being a squib." He put a comforting hand on Niall's knee, giving it an encouraging squeeze and a playful little shake. "Hey, no way are you ever going to be useless with all that fire in your heart. There's so much you can do, titch. So much. Life's too short to do it all, trust me."

"What about Mary, though?" the boy asked, uncertainty clinging to his mind. "What's a proper witch like she's gonna be ever gonna need a squib brother for?"

"Magic, shmagic," the man scoffed with a dismissive wave of his hand. "There are more important things, like friendship and bravery. And you have both of those to offer in spades. Little Mary's going to need her big brother to be there for her in times to come, so you'd better be ready. The greatest challenges in life are rarely overcome with a flick of a wand. Magic won't help you when it comes to beating me in Mario Kart. You're gonna have to work for that."

The boy's crossed arms loosened up minimally, but perceptibly. "Being a wizard would've been pretty neat though, still."

The man contorted his face into an overstated grimace of doubt. "Eh," he complemented with a shrug. "Personally, I've always struggled to take anyone seriously who waggles a tiny stick in the air while spouting word salad like a total nutter. Including myself."

Niall giggled even more merrily than before, and the man was incredibly glad to hear it. "But _you_ totally were cool. _You_ were a real hero."

The man chuckled. "Ouch," he then feigned deepest hurt. "What do you mean, _were?"_

"Now you're just old and boring," the boy teased him with a spark of joyous mischief in his bright eyes, laughing now in earnest at the man's comically shocked expression.

"Well," the man pointedly said when he was done shaking his head at the little rascal, "maybe you're right, though. I mean, it _has_ been an awfully long time since I've been either a _Quidditch star_ or a _hero,_ if I ever even was either one of those to begin with. And yet, somehow, here I still am. Funny how that goes. And you know what?"

"What?"

"These past few years, boring as they may seem to _some_ cheeky yobs around here," and he poked the giggling boy's ribs, "also happen to have been the best of my life, and don't you doubt it for a minute. I'm a husband and father, a friend and neighbor... a mediocre Quidditch coach. But a decent cook, if I do say so myself. Which, come to think of it, really begs the question why I'm earning my Galleons doing the former rather than the latter..."

"You're a great coach!" Niall fiercely disagreed with the man's sober self-assessment. "You can still win the championship this year, if you don't waste all your time cooking and stuff."

The man laughed. "I'll keep that in mind as I lay out my plans for the rest of the season. Less cooking, more coaching. Gotcha."

They shared a cheerful little moment which soon progressed into a reflective sort of silence, almost-ten-year-old Niall Scott Ingham doing some serious soul-searching as one or two of the Hollow's busy citizens walked by unobtrusively, in passing greeting the two familiar neighbors with amicable smiles. The man, despite managing to reciprocate the greetings, was quite ruminative himself, absently running an index finger along the line of his jaw from ear to chin. He had a feeling in which particular roundabout the boy's mind might be stuck.

"You're still trying to come up with a fail-safe way for you to be super special, aren't you?"

Immediately the boy's sunken head shot up, bobbing rapidly up and down.

The man found it impossible to entirely suppress the laughter rising in his chest. He took a deep breath. "Okay," he stated. "So, magic may be cool, it may be silly—jury's still out on that—but either way you kind of think that witches and wizards are special regardless, because there are so few of them, right?"

The boy gave a single nod of affirmation.

"So they are special because they're rare," the man went on to discover where exactly he was going with this. "It's a reasonable definition of the word, I'll give you that. But you see, Muggles aren't just one big group of identical people either, you know? There are lots of different groups among them, too. I mean, a family is a group as well, right? Maybe the most important one we can belong to. The community of this town is a group. A particularly wild bunch, that one. But if we're talking activities, well, Muggles have their wizards too, in a way. And they've got groups, like professions, that have by far fewer members than the group that consists of all the wizarding folk in the world, making them even _more_ special, going with your definition, than witches and wizards and their weird obsession with wooden sticks."

The man's eyes wandered up towards the brilliant sky above them as if in search of something, and astonishingly enough he actually appeared to have found some thing or another.

"Astronauts, for example," he all but blurted out, his gaze at once turning back to the boy. "Do you have any idea how many astronauts there have been that actually went all the way up there into space? To the moon, even?"

Niall shook his head, his absolutely undivided, saucer-eyed attention all on the man in front of him. "How many?"

"Well," the man answered and drifted off aimlessly, and for a moment the word just hung in the air between them without anywhere else to go. Licking his lips and canting his head from one side to the other, the man slowly caught up with the markedly inconvenient fact that he had not entirely thought this one through. "Not a whole lot," he then added for want of any more satisfying alternatives. "I can tell you that much. Which isn't exactly very much, but... at any rate, the number of wizarding folk in the world at any point in time is by far larger than the number of astronauts that have _ever_ been to space. Not even close. And so that would be just one of the many ways for you to be as special as you want to be without a semi-reliable sparkler in your hand all year round."

Niall mulled that one over for a bit.

"All I'm saying is," the man took the opportunity to elaborate further, "you don't need to be a wizard in order to be special. And that's the truth. There are so many ways to be special or to be part of something special in some way or another, Niall. You just have to find your own, and it'll come to you in time."

"I _could_ be an astronaut," Niall whispered quite momentously, his eyes narrowed thoughtfully.

"Well, uh... sure, I suppose," the man agreed somewhat vaguely, puzzled to see the boy hopping off the bench already, by all appearance fully prepared for his imminent job interview at NASA. "I mean, it was really just meant as an example, you know? My point was... what I said it was, I think. You see, there's lots of things you could potentially—"

"Thanks!" Niall gave him a brief hug, nearly as heartfelt as it was fundamentally impatient, then swirled around on the spot and skipping down the street happily announced to the world, "I'm going to be an astronaut!"

"Oh boy," the man sighed with a hand raking through his black hair. Yet unavoidably a grin spread on his features as he watched young Niall Scott Ingham darting off with those yet-to-properly-grow legs, and quietly he mumbled to himself, "Just don't forget your protein pills, titch."

And past his parents snugly seated on rattan garden chairs with a small round table between them little Niall bounced straight into the Ingham residence of 12 Rose Petal Road, repeating his enthusiastic proclamation so that they too would know what's up. And Mr and Mrs Ingham, having their troubled conversation about their beloved son disrupted in this wildly unforeseeable manner by the very subject of their discussion, found themselves perplexedly staring at each other with amusement burgeoning on their faces, momentarily dispelling all their concerns.

Today, against all odds, was turning out to be a good day in Godric's Hollow.

~•~

 **3**

Thomas Halen was standing rigidly in the soft vernal breeze, his long arms straight and stiff at his flanks, his head slightly inclined. The lone man's shadow like a dark, diaphanous shroud lay on the arrangement of fresh flowers at his booted feet, dulling their otherwise so vivid hues. His shadow's elongated head hung heavily in the very center of the white marble headstone before him, partly covering the name of one Demelza Kyne engraved thereon: the girl whose life the man had taken over twenty years ago. And beneath her name were numbers of a kind that in some better place than this would never be read on the lithic sentinels of a human being's last rest: 1989-1996.

Halen had visited the grave for eight consecutive years now, ever since he had been released from Azkaban, and always on the same spring day: the anniversary of the day Demelza Kyne's sweet voice had within one cruel instant been cut off in an irreversible flash of green, never to be heard again. Few ever came here, for few were left to come. Demelza's most faithful company in silence everlasting lay to both her sides: her mother to her left, her older sister and her father to her right. Locals still tended to the family grave as a matter of course and without ostentation, for the Kynes had been part of the community, and in the Hollow no such thing was easily forgotten. On occasion, to that day, a solitary passer-by paused and for a moment stood in quiet remembrance at these four headstones, but only Thomas Halen did so every year on the same spring day.

A harsher gust of wind like one of winter's last stragglers descended upon him then, tugging at his tattered old coat and sweeping him out of his tenebrous ruminations. A human figure squatting at a grave on a slightly lower slope of the cemetery hill caught his eye: the only living soul there among the dead, Halen thought to himself. He recognized the man almost instantly even with his back turned Halen's way. He knew the grave, and he knew the man. He knew them all too well. He considered retreating, stealing away unseen and unheard like the fugitive he had never ceased to be, yet even as the thought lingered in his mind in restless wait for an answer, the other man rose to his full height and after a brief moment's pause turned around and came ambling up the stepping stone path into Halen's direction, as yet unaware of him.

He would so nearly have passed him by without a tale to tell, if not for the ever-fateful play of happenstance. But just so an involuntary twitch went through Halen's body right in that moment, drawing attention where it was not desired, and when the two men were for one fleeting instant shoulder to shoulder their eyes briefly met. Two slowing steps past the motionless man the passer-by stopped in his tracks. There was silence for a while, and little movement. The wind's low murmur rose to a rustle in the leaves of a lone oak tree on the top of the Hollow's most silent hill, but soon blew on and died away, all but muting the world completely.

"Thomas Halen," was all the man said, having turned around to look at the person he therewith addressed.

Halen gave a weak nod, his posture and orientation unchanged. He had trouble finding his voice at first, for seldom he sought it nowadays. "Wasn't sure you'd rec'nize me," he managed eventually, the sound of his own voice, once cast across his chapped lips with some considerable effort, coarse and strange in his ears. Unsettling even.

"I've seen you here before," the other man revealed. "Couple of years back. Read the article in the Prophet when you were released, too. Saw the pictures. I've always been pretty good with faces, I suppose."

Again Halen nodded, in an ambiguous and barely pertinent sort of way. "Been comin' here every year," he listened to himself speak, unable to discern where the words were even coming from, "though I'm not all sure why anymore." He paused. Hesitance, then capitulation. "The first time, I think, was little more than some mechanical... act o' contrition, yeah? Seekin' penance, that the word? Think it was some sense o' havin' t'do it that drove me more than a real sort o' choice, y'now? A year later, close t'madness back then, I returned lookin' for... man, I don't even 'member what it was. Some kind o' answer? A way out, perhaps? Forgiveness?" He scoffed, having virtually spat out that last word in contempt. "But there's none t'be found in a grave. Think that's the only answer I ever got standin' here. Asked her a lot o' questions o'er the years, I did, but that's the only answer I ever got."

He paused, then turned around to face the would-be passer-by for the first time. The latter, despite identifying Halen on the briefest of sideways glances a minute before, nevertheless found himself startled at the frontal sight of this haggard husk of a human being in front of him: the pallid skin of his face stretched tautly over the bones of his skull, dark circles around sunken eyes and untimely streaks of gray in his matted shock of dirty blond hair. Halen, despite in actuality being a few years younger than him, would easily have passed as several years his senior. He looked, it struck the other man, actually worse than he had in the pictures he remembered.

There was some faint potential of an attractive man underneath that disconcerting exterior, perhaps even the face of a rock star destined to adorn the cluttered bedroom walls of swooning adolescent girls around the world. But he was too far gone from any such potential and looked instead as if he had never gotten out of Azkaban, or left most of himself behind there where Dementors undying forever feast on the unliving.

"Think others would know me too if they saw me here?" Halen asked, the tone of his voice too flat and anodyne to make him seem overtly anxious. "Wouldn't wanna make anyone uncomfortable, or 'rouse their anger or somethin'."

"Nobody would give you any trouble even if they were to recognize you," the other assured him. "They may not bear much love for you in their hearts, but I doubt there was ever any violence in this town that wasn't brought upon it from outside. Ignoring the great pub brawl of '09, of course. Winston Toller lost his pride, and David Ingham lost a contact lens. Neither of which has been recovered to this day."

An evanescent ghost of a smile flashed over Halen's thin and brittle lips, gone without a trace before ever reaching his vagrant eyes. He remained lost in scattered thoughts for a moment, vacillating between the risk of curiosity and the safety of routine, like someone who is seeking answers but is frightened to find them. "What 'bout you?" he at last relented. "Think me bein' here is wrong somehow? Unappropriate?"

The other man shook his head in the negative. "I think that's none of my business. A place of remembrance should be open to anyone who is either unwilling or unable to forget, regardless of where they come from. This is no court of justice, and you faced yours a long time ago."

Halen gave a pensive nod. "Justice, yeah." Something of a hollow, twisted corpse of a chuckle raspily escaped his dry throat. "Prolly takes a bigger mind than me own to figure out what that's s'posed t'be. Not sure I've ever seen a whole lot of it 'round. Not in the places I've been, anyways. Is it justice that I'm standin' up here, y'think, and she's lyin' down there?"

The other man shifted his weight from one leg to the other, discreetly redistributing the weight of the brown paper bag in his arm. "I'm not sure I can answer that, Thomas."

"Sorry," Halen offered with a slight bow of the head, as undeniably clumsy as it seemed to be sincere. "Didn't mean no offense or nothin'."

"It's fine," said the other man. "I just don't think it's my place to be the judge of these matters. I have my opinions, of course, but I suspect you're asking me for more than that. And that I cannot give you."

Halen appeared grateful, as much as any such distinct disposition could be gleaned from his perturbingly torpid mien. It was more in the subtle way his body appeared to relax, marginally but visibly. "Guess I always 'xpected you'd be more spiteful 'wards... someone like me. Hateful, even. Wouldn't hold it 'gainst you, neither."

His jaws incessantly were hard at work, as much at odds with one another as the chambers of his heart. "Still bear the mark, y'know?" He touched his lower left arm with his bony and in multiple spots darkly bruised right hand, and the other man's attentive eyes followed his gesture without giving away the nature of a single thought behind them. "Tried t'remove it once. Others did too, or so I heard. But it always comes back if y'do. Even tried cuttin' out the skin 'neath it." He shook his head, slowly. "It's faded a bit o'er the years since then. Not sure it's ever goin' t'go away completely, but now I've a big ugly scar t'remind me, so I guess it don't matter much no more. Don't know I deserve t'be rid of it, anyhow."

The other man gave him a neutral look of acknowledgment but otherwise did not respond, leaving Thomas Halen to awkwardly clear his throat as he scratched the patchy stubble on his concave cheeks.

"You sure you don't hate me?" he asked with a helpless attempt at a smile that inevitably turned out crooked in all the wrong ways, and it soon fizzled out like a dying candle on its last flicker. He nervously gnawed on his lower lip with yellow if not yet rotten teeth.

"I am," the man replied. "I don't hate you, and I never have. I'd never even heard your name until I read that article in the Prophet years ago. I knew of the raid on the Kyne house before and that it was led by the Carrows, but not who else was involved." He took a deep breath, its exhalation a prolonged sigh. "There was a whole lot I hated a long time ago, but there's little of all that hate left in me now." He shrugged his shoulders, causing some indistinct metallic clatter in the bag on his arm. "No room for it."

A grunt came from Halen, hard to read in its meaning. "Hate was all I had, man. Thought it made me stronger. Tougher. Made people 'fraid o' me. Hate was the only thing I loved... till I saw with me own eyes what good it did. Too late, o' course. Always too damn late, eh?" A noticeable tremor went through his long limbs, perhaps just a chill. He exhaled a quavery breath, then bit down on his bottom lip again as if to steady it. His eyes ended up fixed on the spot of earth where Demelza lay buried, and the seconds went on by. Somewhere in the distance beyond the hill a child's voice cried out in joy and a dog happily barked a couple of times. Briefly there was laughter of at least two human voices, then nothing again.

"Wish I could bring her back, y'know?" Halen whispered scarcely loud enough for the other man to hear. "Still do, every day. Wish it so much it hurts, an' it's the only feelin' I got left. Everythin' else is just numb. If I could somehow trade me fuckin' worthless life for hers, I'd do it in a flash. No hesitation, man—I bloody mean it. Think of all the things she could've been an' done." He snorted and wiped his nose with the stained sleeve of his coat. "But there she is... and here I am."

The reflective look in the other man's eyes persisted even as they wandered off and up to that mighty old oak, its lobed leaves bathing in the spring sun. For quite a while neither of them spoke another word. Then, on a sharp intake of air, something intangible seemed to jerk Halen out of his thoughts all of a sudden, as if he had drifted so far off he had momentarily forgotten all around and perhaps within him.

"Beg your pardon, sir," he stammered with a touch of embarrassment. "Didn't mean t'be rude, takin' up all your time like this."

"Not at all," the other reassured him levelly. "It was me who approached you, if you recall, not the other way around."

"Yeah, sure, but irregardless," Halen sputtered on, making a noncommittal step backward, "I'd best leave y'be now an' be on me way, I reckon."

The man with the brown paper bag readjusted his glasses with thumb and index finger routinely at one rimless lens. "Where's that way of yours leading to, if you don't mind my asking?"

Burying his hands deep in the frayed pockets of his coat, Halen gave an indifferent shrug as he retreated another small step. "Somewhere. Nowhere."

The man pursed his lips and raised his chin. "Haven't found Elsewhere yet, huh?"

Halen looked up, his evasive eyes for once fully focused; for the first time during their chance encounter the two men's eyes truly met, and some implicit understanding seemed to be exchanged between the two that likely neither of them had expected to find. "Been wonderin' for a long time now if the past ever ends, y'know?" Thomas Halen expressed. "But I figure it's not s'posed to for the likes o' me."

"I don't think it ever really does for anyone," the man replied, his eyes following a scattering of flocculent white clouds that lazily drifted across the vast blue sky on unhasting winds. "It only ever dies with us, and usually not even then completely, depending on what we leave behind in this world. If you spend your life trying to kill your past, all you'll ever achieve is looking like a fool."

Halen kept grinding his teeth as he considered the other's words. "But what if... what if your past is too bloody awful t'live with? What if your past is killing you?"

The bespectacled man breathed audibly in and even more loudly out, and much to the puzzlement of his raddled interlocutor went on to calmly take a seat on the weathered old wood bench to his side, opposite of the Kyne graves and those contiguous to them. He put the brown paper bag down on the ground between his legs, leaving the remaining space of the bench conspicuously unoccupied.

"Getting old, I guess," he then commentated on his own behavior, eliciting a more honest, almost lively chuckle from Halen, who still stood there not knowing what exactly to do with this decidedly unexpected turn of events.

"Aren't even forty yet, are you?"

"Thirty-eight this summer."

Halen contorted his mouth and nodded. "Close 'nough, I s'pose."

The man leaned forward, supporting his elbows on his knees. Absently plucking at a loose thread that he found protruding from underneath a sleeve button of his white linen shirt, he asked, "Do you happen to know where I live, Thomas?"

"Your parents' house, right?" Halen answered with an unprecedented semblance of enthusiasm permeating his whole demeanor, by all appearance rather pleased to know anything at all. "The place where they—" He stopped abruptly, then cleared his throat abashedly and turned his head to the side to hide his face from view, a tinge of red emerging on the stretch of skin above his sharp cheekbones.

"Where they were murdered, yes," the man completed the aborted utterance. "The last place they called home." He paused for a moment, his eyes fixed on his steepled fingers. "I was hesitant to go back there for a long time, even while the vague idea was always hovering about somewhere at the back of my mind, whether I admitted it to myself or not. My godfather once told me how much my parents had loved the place. How they had immediately felt right at home there. Like they belonged. Despite the fact that it was meant to be no more than a temporary hideout, originally. Still, in the first fifteen years of knowing who I actually was I came here just one time, and then only of necessity. For some subconscious reason I shunned it." He looked up at Halen then. "You are trapped in the past, I used to avoid it like the plague. Two ways of going wrong, I'd say."

Halen had listened intently, yet remained firmly rooted to the spot three safe steps away from the bench, negotiating, deliberating with himself. The other man stayed where he was, just sitting there with his elbows still on his knees and showing no inclination to stand up again any time soon. His gaze was directed at some indeterminate point in the distance, his fingers still twiddling inconsequentially with the sleeve button of his shirt. The bench did not look particularly inviting on its own merits, but the man did not appear to be outright uncomfortable on it, either.

And so, after a while, Thomas Halen, much in the manner of some wild animal unaccustomed to human contact, first made half an uncertain step forward and then at last closed the distance to the bench to timidly sit down at its unoccupied end, all but pressed into the rickety armrest and leaving enough empty space between the two men for three more. Hunching his shoulders with his hands still in the pockets of his coat, he shuffled his well-worn brown leather boots in the dirt beneath the bench for a bit. Without intent he ended up kicking a small stone with the scuffed tip of his boot and was embarrassed all over again when it inelegantly bounced off of one of the graves on the other side of the path.

"So now y'live there," he quickly picked up where he felt they had left off in his best approximation of a casual conversation.

"Yes," the man confirmed, folding his hands. Three seconds passed in perfect quietude as distant memories resurfaced like long-lost photographs, their colors faded under coats of dust but their meaning yet unclouded. "Eventually I... heeded its call, if you will. But for years prior I preferred to stay far away from it all. Rented a random flat right in the urban heart of London for a year that had no connection to me or my past at all. There was no magic in it, literally and figuratively, and maybe I needed that for a while. When Voldemort fell and all I was _marked_ to do was finally done, I found myself wondering, for the first time in my life, what I might _want_ to do. And at first I didn't have the foggiest idea what to do with that."

Halen nodded his understanding. The man smiled to himself as he went forth, "My best friend, of course, very much wished to properly finish her education at Hogwarts, whereas I had trouble seeing any benefit in that for myself. Didn't do a whole lot for a little while, but eventually and against my initial reservations I picked up the Knights of Kernow on their offer and became a professional Quidditch player mid-season. Got off to a bit of a rough start there... but let's not get into that."

A grin flickered over Halen's lips so briefly it was easily missed, and the man continued, "The following year, which my best friend and I spent mostly apart from one another, turned out to be the year in which we came to realize what we truly meant to each other. Took us a while. Didn't waste much time before I asked her to marry me, though, and never was I more certain of anything. Life was good for a while. Really, really good. I was slowly but surely becoming who I am; the pieces of my life seemed to be falling into place. And I came so close to reaching the peak, the summit, the very top, as I perceived it back then: that sodding world cup! Would've been the first time for Britain in half a century. Merlin's arse, so damn close! Quarter final, safely in the lead, about to get substituted. And then my injury happened."

"Yeah, I read 'bout that," Halen remarked. "Not when it happened, o' course. Was still in... in Azkaban then. But later I did. Must've been pretty brutal."

The man shrugged his shoulders. "Got lucky, though. Evaded the permanent wheelchair by a hair's breadth. Not that I felt particularly lucky at that moment."

"Can imagine. You were pretty good, weren't you?"

The man smiled. "I had my moments."

"Would've been brill to see 'em," said Halen. "Used t'love Quidditch when I was a wee lad. Shite you had t'give it up in your prime like that, man."

"Yeah, well. Felt like I had lost everything at first," the man remembered, absentmindedly turning the single ring on his left hand between thumb and middle finger of his right. "And then, with a new day, my wife was suddenly pregnant, blowing that kind of nonsense right out of my mind. We weren't exactly planning it at the time, weren't yet sure how it would all fit together, but I guess that's how life goes sometimes. And it was that very moment when I knew, from one second to the next, really, that I had to rebuild the only house in which I had ever lived as part of my own family, to make it so again. I finally got it. It was the right thing to do, and I couldn't wait to get started."

He leaned back with a shrug, forgetting his intention of keeping his immaculate white shirt as far away from the soiling threat of the backrest as possible. "Some would deem it morbid or macabre, I assume," he went on, _"Someone_ at the Daily Prophet surely did and promptly informed the eagerly interested rest of our tiny underworld about it in her precious weekly column. Maybe I would even share the sentiment to some extent if I had been older when it all happened, and could remember seeing them... lying there, wherever it ended. Maybe that would have been too much to bear. I never asked anyone where exactly they were found. But I know my father was downstairs and my mother upstairs with me. And that breaks my heart a little bit every time I think of it, you know? That they didn't even get to die in each other's arms, like they should have. But they tried to fight—tried to fight something so far beyond their power. And of course they did. They were parents. It's what you do."

His voice cracked ever so slightly, and he inconspicuously wiped at the corner of his eye with the tip of his middle finger. He softly cleared his throat and went on with a steadied voice, "When I see that cottage nowadays, somehow death is the last thing on my mind. Which is funny, in a way, considering for the longest time it was likely the only thing that people thought or spoke of in regard to it. It was defined by tragedy. But when I look at it I think of my godfather's words, and I hear their laughter, see their joy and feel their love. It's all in there, and it's all in me. And I honestly never felt closer to my parents, never felt more at home than the moment I started working on that house with my hormonally unstable wife and our future child at my side. Mere weeks after feeling as if my life had ended all over again, I saw it beginning all anew right in front of my eyes. Like dear old Fawkes rising from his own ashes. I saw it mending and starting to make sense once more."

Fully immersed in his reminiscence now, the man's words were flowing on, pouring out of him like a stream of time and memory, and Thomas Halen never took his unguarded eyes off of him, leaning closer ever so slightly with one elbow on the backrest and his hands loosely clasped in the air. "But scars remain, even as wounds heal," the man kept telling his story. "You know that as well as I do. The northeastern part of the upper floor was completely ripped apart by whatever inhuman power Tom's first demise unleashed. A little more, I think, and the entire house would've collapsed.

"I think we did rather a fine job fixing it all up, if I do say so myself. Had a lot of help, too. But there's this one spot, you see, which I really only noticed months after it was all done. And I'm getting dangerously close now to arriving at some kind of a point here. See, there's this... ghost of a crack in the wall where it once was blown apart. Not a physical one, I think. You can't feel it underneath your fingertips. Not really. The closer you get, in fact, the fainter it appears. It's like an almost imperceptible shadow that sometimes seems to be gone for good, only to catch my eye in a certain kind of light again on another day.

"I tried to paint over it once or twice. Made the newly painted line stand out more than the stupid ghost crack I tried to get rid of." He chuckled, and with a second's delay Halen joined him. "Ended up repainting the entire room, naturally. And finally, at long last a wiser man, I learned to accept it. It's part of the house, part of my home. It's not going anywhere, and that's okay." And he turned his head then, tearing his eyes away from some faraway place to look directly at the former convict sitting next to him on that moldy old bench. "I think the past can only end when you use the present to build a future. When at least some part of the here and now is a building block of tomorrow. You can't ever erase the past, Thomas. You can only build on top of it. Sometimes you'll have to work around it a little bit, but if you stray too far from the foundation nothing you'll ever build will last. It'll be no more than a cheap façade, toppled by the first breeze."

The man who had taken a life and never found his own thought about that for a while, until at last his head swinging slowly from side to side presaged a dismal conclusion. "I don't know, man. I just don't know. What's there t'build on for me? What'm I s'posed t'do with these kinds o' ruins? There's been a lot o' pain in your life. Like a real lot. Ups 'n' downs 'n' all. I get that—I do. But pain y'can build on, right? Pain y'can heal or deal with or somethin'. But all this guilt an' shame—this kind o' cold, tight guilt I carry 'round with me? If that's all you got? How'm I s'posed t'build 'round that? It's too damn big, man. Too fuckin' ugly. Nothin's ever gonna last on top o' that, an' prolly nothin' should."

"I don't have your guilt," the other man replied, "but I have mine. People died because of me. People died _for_ me, so that I could live on. And I too have killed people. In war, in self-defense or to protect others. Because they were the bad guys, because this, because that—blah blah blah." He scoffed bitterly. "I once saw a Death Eater throwing away her mask and crying—weeping and screaming so desperately over a fellow Death Eater hanging limply in her arms. I was all but paralyzed for a moment, struck by that incomprehensible scene before me and transfixed to the spot in the middle of an ongoing battle, and I remember thinking to myself, 'What an utterly awful mess of a world we inhabit.'

"You can rationalize it all you want, but in the end there's still the unavoidable truth that I have killed human beings. And whether they were or weren't the best our kind has to offer—and how arrogant would I have to be to presume I am?—it nevertheless weighs on my conscience and it always will. Because I didn't just put an end to what they were, but to everything else they possibly could've, might've been. Maybe something better yet. Guess we'll never know."

Halen's eyes, shadowed under a deeply furrowed brow, had strayed off and eventually found their way back to the headstone of Demelza Kyne, the smooth white marble well-nigh blindingly bright in the sunlight. "But people forgive you for it," he muttered in a weak voice.

"Do they?" the man rejoined. "Well, maybe they shouldn't. I certainly don't. Maybe forgiveness has become a bit too convenient a thing. I for one firmly believe there are some things we as humans do that are fundamentally unforgivable. Those curses are named that way for a reason. I forgive my friend for being an incorrigible dunce sometimes. I forgave my children for making the kitchen floor the canvas of their newest crayon masterpiece once. I forgave my wife for eating the last of my favorite Christmas biscuits without sharing. But killing a fellow human being... willfully ending a life like that?"

He shook his head. "No," he said, resolutely. "No. There's no forgiveness for that. No letters of indulgence. No easy way out. The only person who could possibly have the right and the power to forgive you is the one you killed. There are always loved ones left behind in mourning. Wounds that even infinity won't heal. And as long as there's at least one soul out there unwilling or unable to forgive us, who the fuck are we to forgive ourselves so readily? Nobody, not a single human being that ever was or shall be, gets through this mess we call life with a clean slate. Everyone ends up tainted in some way or another. Battered if not broken, scarred if not disfigured. And we'd better bear the scars of the wounds we inflict on others without excuses before we start talking about that all-you-can-eat buffet of absolution everybody is so fond of frequenting for a Knut and a half."

More agitated than he had either intended or expected to get, the man tried to calm the turmoil in his chest as he threw a sidelong glance Halen's way and found him sunken back into himself, his shoulders sagging, his head hanging low between them. His unwashed hands, scarred and scabbed underneath all the accumulated dust and grime, lay folded in his lap as if in prayer.

"Damn it, Thomas," the man cursed to the heavens, his voice subdued. "Damn it all to hell! I know your story, as well as I can without ever having heard it in your own voice. I know you were more child than man, an impressionable youth. I know how lost you were, searching for something to give you meaning and purpose and power in a life without either purchase or direction. You were the perfect recruit for the next best cause: a promising but so malleable mind, a forsaken and oh so breakable soul. I fully realize you were as much a victim of their cult as you were its newest initiate. I understand you were deceived, used and coerced, and I don't see a reason to suspect your remorse is anything but genuine. I wouldn't be talking to you if it were any other way. I know the hand that held the killing wand was yours, but the will that made you scream those words out into the world was not your own, for you had no will to speak of. I can imagine the tears burning in your eyes as that fatal incantation left your throat, and I know how desperately you wanted to be part of something greater than yourself even as you witnessed your own self breaking apart in that moment of annihilation.

"But Thomas, you swore an oath, you pledged allegiance to the man who killed my parents in cold blood, and countless others before and after them. Perhaps you didn't truly know what you were doing, and maybe there is some degree of exculpation to be found therein. But I also know as well as you that before it was too late, before it was all lost in that one defining moment, and before you came face to face with the devastating consequences of your own confusion, there were times when you were fully ensnared by his corrosive promises, his compelling vision... his _greatness._ There were moments of rapture and utter conviction, am I not right? There was exhilaration in your newfound purpose. For a little while you reveled in that invigorating sense of superiority, and you bore his mark with pride. Until you killed a seven-year-old girl because you knew if you didn't, the Carrows would've killed you both."

Not even the most miniscule of motions seemed to course through Halen's body as he sat there listening to the telling of his own story, taking it all in, weighed down but never cowering away, utterly frozen in place as the uncaring world kept on turning around him. The only thing which in that collapsing moment gave away that there was life in him yet were the hot tears that one after another were falling down directly from his closed eyes onto his hands, where running on they left behind stark trails of exposed skin in the smudges of long-dried dirt.

"The fact that you are incapable of forgiving yourself," the man spoke softly on, "is the reason I'm sitting here with you. Others would disagree, I'm sure, but in my opinion that very fact is what ennobles your character. I mean it. And I realize how that may sound like I'm blowing my own trumpet here as well, seeing how I just went on about not forgiving myself, either. I try not to pat myself on the back for it _all_ the time... but in all seriousness, I can't help but see that nobility in you. In the way you carry that burden even as it breaks you."

"Never felt specially noble," Halen muttered in between half-suppressed sobs.

"I know," said the other man. "Maybe that's an integral part of it, actually. Hell, I've seen people dancing ever onward through their perfectly blissful lives after having done the worst kinds of things. From the everyday betrayal of their friends and loved ones, the constant abuse and deceit, the cheating and the lying and the never-ending backstabbing, to things more abhorrent even than all those. And all of it with only ever one single interest in mind: themselves. And they just keep on dancing and prancing without a care in the world. Like nothing ever happened, and as if their paths aren't littered with the torn-out pieces of all those they trampled over and left behind in the mud. They've got the most charming smiles on their faces, too. Proper sunshines, those fellas. You'll likely find one of these incredibly profound, crisp little calendar mottos, like _Carpe Diem_ , pasted in a neat cursive on their bedroom wall. They've got it all figured out.

"But not you. There are no easy answers for you. No trite motivational poster that makes it all okay. No pretenses. Unlike too many others who bear that same mark on their left arm as you, you never stood there in front of judge and jury and sniveled, begged and groveled for forgiveness and mercy and all those convenient little things they oddly enough never deigned to grant anyone else, but now have the gall to request for themselves. Because inwardly, you had already pronounced your own sentence of lifelong guilt. You accepted responsibility for your actions. You faced their unalterable consequences, and you keep facing them year after year in this very spot right here. You own up to them every day, even at the cost of your own life. And that is worth something. There's a heart of decency in you, Thomas. It's suffered a lot. It's been led astray. You stopped listening to it altogether once. But it's still beating."

A quiet once again ensued, briefly interrupted as if from some other world entirely by a car engine roaring up somewhere to the north and soon fading away in the distance. Eventually one last violent sob jerked through Thomas Halen. He sniffed back the snot in his runny nose in wildly unflattering a fashion, then wiped his face with a minimally less filthy part of his coat sleeve. "But what'm I s'posed t'do with this pathetic heart of me?" he asked with a craggy voice, and he cleared his throat roughly to get it back together. "Best thing I've done in the past eight years was nursin' a pigeon with a broken wing back to health, till it could fly again."

"Well," the other man assessed with a smile, "it's a start."

"Some folks out there really hate them pigeons, though."

Laughter unavoidably escaped the other man's chest, and kind of nature though it was he quickly stifled it. "Can't ever do right by everyone, so you'd best not make a habit of trying."

"I just wanna do right by her an' her family," Halen mumbled, staring at the graves that had defined nearly his entire existence, his bloodshot eyes still glistening with the residual sheen of fallen tears. "Don't see how I ever could."

The man at the other end of the bench sighed the longest of sighs as his eyes were drawn back to another grave: that single black granite headstone whence he'd come, down at a crossing of the stepping stone path and perfectly in view from his elevated spot on the bench, adorned on one side with a single white lily that for some inexplicable reason never seemed to wither in its clay vase.

"A long time ago," he began in a musing tone, "when I was introduced to the world of magic, one of the very first thoughts that entered my mind was the idea that maybe now I could finally get my parents back. Even before I came to know what had really happened to them, when that story of a car accident was still my subjective truth. Surely magic would present me with a way to bring them back, right? There had to be some kind of ancient spell or arcane device that would enable me to go back in time and save them. What was magic if not the means to make miracles happen? Learning that even magic has its limitations was one of my more sobering lessons, because for a while there, deep down, that timeline that never came to be, where my parents live and I get to know them and we all get to be together, was the only thing I truly wanted. It was the only vision the Mirror of Erised could show me. The family I had lost. The family of my past.

"Some small part of me will always grieve for that life that never came to pass, and I'll always, _always_ miss them. But the thing is," and here his voice began to struggle just a bit, "I can't wish for that magical time travel... can't yearn for that other life anymore, because I've built a life of my own now. One I simply cannot sacrifice. Not even for them."

He exhaled a shaky sigh, composed himself with a steeling breath and went on, "I can't even say when exactly I first became aware of it. There was no dramatic moment of realization. It was a slow and gradual thing, subtle and unnoticed, that kept spreading in me bit by bit as I asked the girl I love to marry me, as I started rebuilding the house I would call home, as I became a father once and then again. The unknown truth of it had suffused me and my entire life long before I became conscious of the fact that I had, in that unspoken way, said goodbye to my parents for the second time. This time not to the reality but to the dream of them. To the yearning for that alternate life."

Thomas Halen peered at the man from behind the thick strands of his hair, but had soon averted his gaze in a respectful manner when he saw the other wiping away a thin line of moisture on his left cheek with the back of his right hand.

"And there you have some more of that guilt of mine," the man concluded. "I can only hope they would understand—would forgive me for letting go of them like that, you know? I hope they would be happy for me, with me. Perhaps a bit proud of me, too. God, I hope I'm doing right by them... hope the boy they died to protect became a man who turned out to be worth it."

Halen opened his mouth, then stalled. "I... I think the boy was already worth it. An' I don't think they'd ever question it neither. But I mean no disrespect. Maybe it's not me place t'say—"

"I appreciate it that you did," the man interrupted him with a small but honest smile on his face. He retreated back into his thoughts for a moment before he spoke again. "I know our situations are not the same, Thomas. I understand our lives have taken vastly different courses at times. And yet... here we both are, aren't we? In this place, presently, that is entirely dedicated to the past.

"And I've been very lucky. You laugh, but it's true. I've been lucky where you have not. I have, in fact, been so ridiculously lucky in this life I sometimes still have trouble believing any of it. To have met the people I've met who love me the way they do, and to find in my heart the capacity to love them as hard as I can in return, that's a blessing I'm not sure I'll ever truly deserve.

"But your problems won't necessarily be solved with my solutions. That's the tricky part. So I'm not telling you to go ahead and simply find your soulmate, build a nest, make some babies and get that domestic bliss going and you're set. It doesn't work like that, I know. What I _am_ saying, I think, is that you need... you need a tomorrow to strive for. Something to look forward to. Something other than compulsion to get you out of bed in the morning. Just a... a tiny pinch of meaning here and there until you've got enough of it to get by with. Everybody needs that. And you can't keep questioning whether you deserve it or not. When there's some sort of kindness in whatever it is that gives you meaning, you probably deserve at least that much."

The man paused to watch Halen for a moment, whose eyes, the color of pale ashes in the light of day, were idly following another human visitor passing slowly between two rows of graves far out of earshot.

"All a lot easier said than done, huh?" the man asked quite rhetorically, then sighed as if in response to himself. "We both know you'll never forgive yourself. Not truly. But maybe being beyond forgiveness is not the same as being beyond redemption. You cannot shed the guilt... won't shirk the responsibility. But the punishment needs to stop, Thomas. You've had enough. You can't take any more of it. And what bloody use is another ruined life to anyone? You need to try and bring some of the good you once helped taking from the world back into it. You already know how, too. You've done it before."

Halen's thoroughly creased brow unmistakably spoke of incomprehension.

"The pigeon," explained the man. _"Carpe Diem_ doesn't mend broken wings, Thomas. It's just another convenience for those who are already flying. Any act of healing is a process and its sole purpose is a better tomorrow. The very idea of it is contingent upon a possible future. If today is all there is, a pigeon with a broken wing will never fly again. You need to do for yourself what you did for that pigeon. For her sake," and he pointed at the grave of Demelza Kyne, "and for your own."

Thomas Halen filled his lungs with air until they could take in no more, then pushed it all back out into the world. He began nodding his head halfway through the exhalation and rubbed his forehead with trembling fingers, then raked his hand through his hair to get the annoying strands out of his eyes. Oily as they were they mostly complied, though not in a particularly fashionable manner.

"Yeah," he breathed in a weak whisper, echoing it seconds later.

Eventually, at the other end of the bench, the man with the rimless glasses puffed air out of his cheeks like someone who just participated in a marathon. "I'm forty-two years too young to be that eighty-year-old lady at the vegetable counter in the grocery store that tells you her unabridged life story," he said with a hand in the shaggy hair at the back of his head. "And, for that matter, not nearly lady enough." He turned to Thomas Halen. "Did I by any chance manage to tell you anything you didn't already know? Or maybe that wasn't even the point..."

Halen grinned at him in response, and despite his less than stellar teeth it for once succeeded in making him look just a tad closer to his actual age. "I think... I think I got lots t'think 'bout, frankly. Nobody's talked t'me like this since... well, don't think nobody ever has, t'tell you the truth. I don't even know what t'say."

"That's okay," the other man replied. "You don't have to say anything... as long as I didn't make an utter fool out of myself."

"No way," Halen assured him with a shake of the head. "Honest. It's just that I—I don't—I mean—" Quite clearly at a loss for words, he averted his eyes in manifest embarrassment.

"I'm glad you think so," the man told him. "The thing is," and he leaned forward and put his palms on his knees, "if I'm not home about a minute ago, my wife's going to accuse me of having an affair with Mrs Fairholme again, and I don't think our marriage could take it. So... I'm afraid I really need to get going here..."

"Yeah, sure, o' course," Halen stammered, back on his feet even before the other man had accomplished as much as picking up his brown paper bag. "Mighty sorry, didn't mean t'hold you up like this."

"Thomas," the man compelled him to pause and look at him, both of them now standing a bench's width apart. "That's really not what happened here, so don't even mention it."

Halen, still flustered from this fundamentally perplexing encounter, absently nodded his head as if in a proper daze. The man, with Halen unaware of the attention, watched him quietly for a moment, his eyes pensively narrowed.

"It doesn't really sit quite right with me to just part ways like this after everything we talked about, everything I said," he eventually spoke, his tone of voice still laced with contemplation. "Talk is cheap, as they say. Granted, they generally say a lot of rubbish, but I think they may be on to something there. So... listen, if there's anything specific I can do for you, anything at all, I think there's a couple of ways in which I might be able to help you in a more practical sense. Do you... do you have a place to stay, if it's not too forward to ask?"

"Yeah," Halen affirmed, unoffended. "Nothin' fancy, o' course. Four walls an' a roof o'er me head, eh? Been workin' in a factory couple o' years now. Better than... than before, at least."

The man gave a nod. "Good," he said. "Or better, at least. May I ask, and I'm aware this is widely deemed a touchy subject as well, if you ever sought professional help?"

Halen merely shook his head, his nose in wrinkles.

"People tend to be ashamed of it," the man proceeded, "but they shouldn't be, if you ask me. At any rate, I've met more doctors over these past twelve years than I would've ever cared to know by name, and I could refer you to one who specializes in that sort of thing, too. She doesn't simply dish out pills like they're Bertie Bott's Every Flavored Beans, if that's what you think. She actually engages with people, and it can be a very good thing. There's no judgment, just support. She's a witch, too, so she would grasp the complete scope and context of your history, which I think is important. Just something to consider. Nothing more, nothing less."

Halen nodded with his lower lip tucked between his teeth again, but didn't verbally respond.

"What about the wizarding side of things?" the man skipped past the uneasy moment.

"Nah," Halen was quick to reply, "Muggles only. Don't have no spark of magic in me life, 'part from a glance at the Prophet sometimes. Just to keep up with things a bit, y'know? Always preferred it that way. Haven't held a wand in me hand since... well, since 1996."

"I understand," said the man. "But if at any point in the future you'd like to reconnect to the wizarding world and that part of yourself, to whichever extent you feel comfortable with, I could definitely help you with that in a couple of ways. In fact, if that pigeon is any indication and you generally enjoy working with animals, I happen to know someone who's fonder of animals than perhaps anybody else in the world—maybe... maybe to a fault at times. But I think he might just be willing to lend you a hand if I tell him about the Thomas Halen I met today."

The Thomas Halen he met that day looked abashed. "That's awfully kind o' you, mister, but why—" He choked on his own words, snuffled and wiped at his nose again. "Why the hell'd y'do any such thing for me?"

"Because I misspoke earlier," the man with the emerald eyes replied. "You are that pigeon, Thomas. I got that much right at least. But I got the important bit wrong: no pigeon will ever be able to heal a broken wing all on its own. It'll need a little help. And kind words alone won't cut it."

For a moment the two men merely stared at each other, one of them calm and composed, the other not so much. Overwhelmed, wide-eyed Thomas Halen directed his gaze at the ground instead, because the ground at least did not gaze back.

"I'd really like it if you'd pick me up on my offer," the man meanwhile told him. "I don't have anything with me to write, but you know how to reach me, right? Do it, when you're ready. Think about it, at the very least. And if you don't, well... I'll be here, in this exact spot, a year from now, hoping to meet you again. Hoping you won't have given up on yourself. Because I haven't, and my offer will still stand. Until then, whenever that's going to be... please take care of yourself, Thomas."

And with these words and an affable parting smile the man with the brown paper bag back on his arm turned around and left, leaving a speechless Thomas Halen to stand there, his eyes glistening wetly in the afternoon sunlight with tears in them that were of a decidedly different kind than the ones that had preceded them, and which unlike those would not become heavy enough to fall.

Long he stood, that lone traveler, who for so long had been running away only to run into himself at every corner. His eyes were fixed on the ever more distant figure of that raven-haired man until eventually he disappeared from sight when the path made a downward bend behind the trees that encircled the Hollow's cemetery hill.

And long he stood there still, even then with nothing left to look at but the trees, the headstones and the flowers, the sky and the clouds, before at last volition returned into his inert being, and he turned to his side and cast his eyes on the final resting place of one Demelza Kyne, his shadow now falling mainly onto the green grass in the gap between two of the graves.

He knew then and there in the depth of his heart he would see her again. No matter what all his tomorrows until then would bring, this was the place he would return to. Perhaps, however, with something new to tell her.

And Thomas Halen turned around and in the mild spring air went his own way past the silent headstones, following the stepping stone path into not quite the opposite direction of the one the other man had vanished in, and leaving Godric's Hollow, where it appeared to the restless wanderer a curious sort of day was unfolding, for now at least behind.

~•~


	2. Part II

**4**

At the eastern end of town there stood a two-storied cottage at the edge of a small grove just a half-giant's stone's throw away from the neighboring yet not quite adjacent houses, connected to the narrow outbound street via a winding gravel path. Originally, as the local legend went, built by a grumpy old hermit who one morning woke up to find an entire town suddenly encroaching on his property (thenceforth the outer hedge and iron gate as its deterrent fortifications), it remained to this day ever so slightly detached from the main part of the Hollow, and yet so very much an indispensable part of it.

The house itself had been rebuilt on more than one occasion, sometimes by choice, sometimes by necessity, and twice even from the ground up, but on the soil in that very spot there had stood one home or another for as long as the Hollow itself had been. For centuries now it had widely been referred to among townsfolk as _The Easternmost Home_ or, geographically arbitrary yet catchy as it was, _Hollow's End._ Although these designations were for the sake of auld lang syne alone still in circulation, for the past four decades the house had mostly and quite prosaically been known as the Potter cottage, despite the fact that for more than half the time not a soul had lived there at all.

Indeed, after tragedy struck in the night of Halloween, 1981, and the once so beautiful home was reduced to a half-demolished monument to man's incurable heart of darkness, it was from then on by many a provincial mind firmly held to be haunted and, in direct consequence, under all circumstances to be shunned. Thus abandoned, the severely damaged house and its surrounding area would likely have fallen into disrepair and soon been conquered by the all too eager overgrowth entirely, had not the Fairholmes, despite being situated on the very opposite end of town, taken it upon themselves to regularly tend to the old hedge and the lawn, the lush garden and the exterior walls of the building as best they could.

And so for many years Hollow's End was only spoken of behind closed doors and in secluded corners, in hushed voices and with somber miens: part ominous gossip, part uneasy remembrance. Time went by and things changed little, until eventually, as it is wont to do, life returned and superstitions receded where stubbornness did not persist. And to the front of the wrought iron gate set neatly into the topiary archway once again a name plate was affixed, and though the sign itself was new since the old one had been lost to time, the italicized name embossed on it remained very much the same that it first had been twenty-six years before: _Potter._

Now, almost another twelve years later, the sign was still there, though perhaps, after years of wear and British weather, soon to be in need of a fresh paint job. Right in front of it there stood just then a man with a brown paper bag on his arm, and he looked first at the sign as if he were for a moment bemused by the name he found written thereon, before his eyes wandered on over the garden to the cottage at the end of the gravel path beyond the gate. The hint of a smile lingered in one curled corner of his lips, and in his emerald eyes there brightly danced a glint of gold: half merely sunlight's kiss, half something more.

And then, after this deceptively unremarkable moment that was all his own, the man opened the gate, stepped through the hedge's archway and noiselessly closed the well-oiled gate behind him again, finally heading for the white front door of the cottage—a door for which his hand would quite magically never in life need a key.

The house, of course, was his own.

"Honey, I'm home!" Harry jauntily warbled into the Potter abode as he stepped inside, secretly loving the unadulterated cliché of the ritual. Closing the front door behind him and dropping his wad of keys (not all doors in his life were as acquiescent to his touch as the one of his home, after all) on top of an old rosewood chiffonier next to the entrance, he headed straight into the kitchen to his immediate right after quickly discarding his shoes with a nimble maneuver of his feet.

Hearing no reply to his incredibly innovative greeting from anywhere in the house in the meantime, he eventually dug a bit deeper into his impressive repertoire of terms of endearment as he put down his brown paper bag on the kitchen island. "Darling? Poppet?" He had already retrieved a number of items from the bag and haphazardly spread them out on the counter around it when he paused and listened more intently. "Snugglebum?"

When still no response came his way as the seconds uneventfully ticked on by, he stepped back out into the corridor and looked briefly about, peering into the dining room vis-à-vis the kitchen with his hand holding on to the doorframe. Nothing either hither or yon caught his attention. Then, however, when at the far end of the hallway through a small gap of the door left ajar his eyes caught a glimpse of two legs lying stock-still on the hardwood floor, Harry felt all his insides convulsing at once and with a sharp gasp started down the corridor, only his heart racing faster even than his legs. He threw himself against the door with a bang and was down on his knees quicker than any of his senses could possibly translate any usable information about his surroundings, which is precisely how and why he ended up with a thoroughly discombobulated Hermione, already half-risen from the floor without his help, gathered in his arms, staring at him perplexedly with a pair of round chocolate eyes.

"Are you okay?" he inquired with unchecked urgency, examining her frantically for any sign of harm or injury. "What happened?"

"I, uh—I guess I must've dozed off for a bit," she stammered, still somewhat shaken from literally being shaken.

Harry Potter stared at his wife of sixteen years with unintentionally comical bewilderment written clearly on every inch of his face. "On the floor?" He looked about from left to right as if he were seeing their living room for the very first time. "Right next to the couch? An arm's length away from the carpet?"

"Well, it wasn't exactly premeditated," she explained what to her still seemed quite obvious, drowsily amused at his most evident incredulity. "I was playing with Longshanks, but the bugger's even lazier than his dad was, and that's saying something. Two rounds of fetch and he gets all cuddly and is purring all over me, and that's still the most potent soporific in the world. Apart from Professor Binns's lectures, perhaps. Where is he, anyway? Our felid, I mean, not Professor Binns."

"Right", Harry absently exhaled only half in reply, rubbing his forehead with the tips of his fingers as his heart and his lungs slowly calmed down again. Only now at the sight of his waning distress did Hermione realize just how serious the incident must initially have seemed to him.

"Hey," she sought to soothe him with a delicate hand tenderly at his cheek. "It's okay. I'm right here, luv. It's all right. I didn't mean to frighten you so. If I had, I would've used some ketchup."

He took a deep breath and nodded his head, even managing a short-lived chuckle at her wonderfully tasteless idea. "Sorry," he said, then was quick to pick up a more cheerful tone. "Well, so much for a productive morning, huh?"

She pouted, and having so solemnly announced her intention of getting back to work on her book to finally put an end to her involuntary hiatus before Harry had left the house in the morning, it was really her only choice. "I'll have you know that I got almost an entire... half of a page done. Which I'll most likely rewrite completely at a later point," she informed him with a wonky sort of pride. "I was really about to find my groove, too... until I got a bit sidetracked."

Harry perked a curious eyebrow at her. "By what? Shanks?"

Hermione shook her head. "You, mostly," she replied with a sprinkling of coyness sneaking into her demeanor, the smile she was giving him somehow managing to be as bashful as it was subtly mischievous.

He gave a sage nod in response to that particular revelation. "I had a feeling this would ultimately end up being my fault."

"Naturally," she readily agreed. "You see, if it weren't for you turning my life upside down for the past two and a half decades I could actually get some work done once in a while without my mind going off on an extensive tangent about our personal _Best Of."_

"Our personal _Best Of?"_ he queried with a more spirited chuckle.

"Oh, nothing too risqué," she said as her enterprising fingers came to fiddle with the buttons of his white linen shirt. "Just some of our... more memorable moments."

"I find the mere implication that we've had any less memorable moments rather insulting, I must say," he humorously opined as his eyes, quite of their own accord, ran down the length of the woman's body in his arms just then. He was bemused to discover that she was dressed in that periwinkle summer dress of hers, so markedly reminiscent of a different sort of dress in much the same color that she had worn only once, and which, incidentally, had helped a good deal in making him realize just how utterly blind he must've been before when it came to the more obvious qualities of his favorite bookworm. Almost a quarter of a century had passed since then, and yet by virtue of this memory's unfading vividness in the most treasured depths of his mind the moment would forever remain as close to him as yesterday.

Having on a cursory peek appreciated the surprising fact that her toenails were neatly painted in the same shade of blue, his eyes came back up over her conspicuously smooth legs and the familiar necklace between her collarbones—the first birthday present he had ever given her as her official boyfriend—to take in her face more thoroughly than his twinge of panic had previously allowed him. Finding her smiling at him in that beatific way that only she could smile, there was little he could do but smile right back at her. There was that touch of color on her cheeks and on her lips that had been gone for far too long, and a fullness to her soft features that over a span of months had been taken out of her, little by little and week after week, by a treatment almost as mercilessly consumptive as the affliction it was meant to fight.

His right hand, as his left was still supporting her back, went up to the locks of her chestnut hair, which thanks to some arcane elixir of keratinous wonders was already long enough to tentatively touch her shoulders again, and quickly coming close to regaining that inimitable wildness which had always seemed to be so at odds with her decidedly orderly personality and often famously (and infamously) posh demeanor. To others at least. Only Harry, of course, had ever unlocked that very same vivacious fire in her heart, and so he alone had come to look at that fierce and barely containable mane of hair as a reflection rather than a contradiction of her innermost self. To see this part of her, this beloved outward manifestation of who she was, reemerge like this after months of draining hardship touched his heart acutely, intensely, and for one teetering second the sensation threatened to overwhelm him.

"You look good," he whispered in a low and halting voice, his heart stumbling over his tongue. "And more importantly, you look well."

Her smile widened, a glimmer dancing in her eyes. "I _feel_ good," she told him softly. "And I think I _am_ well. For the first time since this particular mess was kind enough to disrupt our lives, I feel really, really good again. I've felt it coming back to me for the past couple of weeks now. Slowly at first. Day by day a little bit. But today I woke up and I looked at you lying there next to me, your eyes still peacefully closed, and I felt the sun on our faces and the warmth in our skin, and it all seemed so... blissfully normal. I felt like myself again, for the first time in months. Not like an impotent passenger in some decrepit alien vessel of putrid flesh and brittle bone. I should write that down. Ugh, I felt like a prisoner in a cell that keeps closing in on me. But no more! My body feels like my own again.

"My skin doesn't hurt when I touch it. The light of day doesn't hurt my eyes. My limbs feel lithe again, my every motion smooth and effortless. There's no soreness. No constant sickly fatigue. No nausea, no headache. My senses are keen again, my mind not dulled anymore. Tired still, yes. Perhaps my brain's still a tad too sludgy to properly get it back to work, as I'll probably have to admit lying here on the floor like a passed out drunk with my laptop all the way over there. But my thoughts have cleared up. I can focus again, if not always on the most purposive train of thought. And my heart is back in it. I'm alive, Harry, and I can feel it. I can believe it again."

"And I am happy to see it," he said with a sheen of emotion in his eyes that was more eloquent than anything he could possibly put into words. He took her hand gently into his, caressing it and showering it with the lightest of kisses from its back to its palm to the tips of her long fingers. There was a playful note in his tenderness, but too much plain sincerity to make it seem in any way facetious.

"It's just too bad about my involuntary nap," Hermione said as she watched his display of affection with a shimmer of entrancement in her eyes. "I wanted to greet you at the door, actually. Hence the dress and all. I really felt like looking the way I feel today, and I intended to make a bit of a show of it. For you, primarily, as I hope you're aware. Is my eye shadow game on point, or what?" She batted her eyelashes at him for demonstration.

"I'm enjoying the show just fine," he assured her, planting another kiss right amidst the locks on top of her head. Inadvertently drinking in her scent he ended up breathing the most contented sigh into her hair. "You smell like yourself again, too," he remarked with his voice slightly muffled, eagerly proceeding to take another sniff or five in a blatantly exaggerated manner, his nose roving friskily all over her head, causing Hermione to giggle and wriggle in his arms. "Merlin, how I missed this smell!"

"Well, don't use it up all at once," she admonished him entirely in jest. "Took me a long time to scrape it all back together."

When his face came back into her view, Hermione was just a tad ecstatic to see that he actually looked a bit dizzy from his immoderate sniffing exercise. Butterflies apparently were not only out and about under the spring sun that day...

"You still look a bit tired, though," he observed as his eyes avidly roamed her features. "In a good way, mind you. A harmless way. Hmm... let me sweep you off the floor and carry you upstairs, what d'you say? I could do with a little afternoon nap myself, frankly. Watching people carry out my instructions all morning long is woefully tiresome business."

Quizzically Hermione arched an eyebrow. "Is that your big plan for our weekend with the house all to ourselves, Mr Potter?"

"Well, Mrs Potter, I definitely didn't intend to spend it on our hardwood floor," he retorted. "Come on. Let's get cozy and just doss about for a little while longer. Maybe we'll go for a walk later. Perhaps down at the coast, if you're up for it. It's almost as beautiful a day outside as it is in here." She smiled up at him, appreciating the meaningful way in which he looked at her as he spoke those particular words. "Might invite ourselves to dinner at Mrs Fairholme's, while we're at it. She'd be delighted to see you like this."

"Some solid ideas right there," she assessed. "Though I must say I'd prefer to put on some underwear prior to any of those activities."

Harry looked surprised, but skillfully played it down. "I would've hoped that Mrs Fairholme wouldn't get to see _that_ much of you either way."

Hermione wrinkled her nose. "I was trying to be sexy here, you know, but you had to go ahead and ruin it."

"You don't have to try," said Harry. "You just are."

Her nose unwrinkled itself with immediate effect, and beaming at him she said, "Could you by any chance be a wizard, my dear? Because that's some serious magic right there."

"If you play your cards just right I might let you hold my wand," he played along with a wink, then however adroitly moved past the blatant innuendo. "So, to loaf or not to loaf. What say you?"

After a moment of careful deliberation, she exhaled a most lugubrious sigh. "Fine. You may carry me upstairs."

And grinning he swept her up as advertised and made his way out of the living room and to the staircase in the adjoining hallway. And then straight past it. Hermione's befuddled inquiry into the whole matter got no further than _Whuh?_ before Harry succinctly explained, "Forgot about the groceries."

And so, making a bit of a silly game out of the task at hand with Hermione largely operating out of Harry's arms, who maneuvered her back and forth and up and down all over the kitchen space for as long as he could, they took care of the near-forgotten groceries together with questionable efficacy but indisputable joy, stowing away fruit and vegetables and bread and butter—and a box of chocolate and a bag of potato chips which had somehow and most inexplicably so sneaked their way in there as well—in their usual spots in bowls on counters, compartments in cupboards and one or two refrigerator shelves, as well as Harry's super secret stash for _The Good Stuff:_ conveniently out of reach of their offspring's grubby mitts.

When all the work was done after triple the time it would have required if only it had been approached in less ridiculous a manner, first signs of fatigue were no longer plausibly deniable on Harry's part, with beads of sweat beginning to gather on his brow. Yet when his wife was on the cusp of reminding him of her ability to walk, he was quick to forestall any such nonsense and picked her right up again. "Sh! Let's not make me feel any older than I already am. I got this... babe. 'Cause you got me, and baby I got you..."

She laughed and in her best and not at all bad sing-song voice joined in, "Babe... _doo-doo, doo-doo, doo-doo,_ I got you babe, _doo-doo, doo-doo, doo-doo..."_

And so, with a smiling Hermione's head resting lightly against his shoulder and her arms loosely wrapped around his neck, they made their way back out of the kitchen and at last towards the originally targeted staircase. Perhaps his presently elated heart was merely playing well-meaning tricks on him, but Harry couldn't help but think that his wife felt just a tad heavier again, after too many increasingly harrowing months in which she had come so horribly close to feeling like little more than a bundle of nothing in his arms. He had carried her quite a lot in recent times, though less so in the last couple of weeks with her strength at long last returning. When had he last carried her to bed, he wondered? Tuesday, was it? Still, she seemed a bit heavier than three days before. A pound at least, no doubt. No less than nine ounces. Almost all herself again, at any rate. Almost.

"How are things at the Burrow?" Hermione inquired somewhere between the softly creaking second and third step of the stairs.

Harry grimaced mirthlessly. "Garden gnomes are back."

"Already?"

"'Tis the season, I guess. The birds and the bees aren't the only ones getting busy, dear."

Hermione scrunched up her nose in understated disgust. "Now there's something I never want to think about."

His chest shook with a chuckle, and for the second time that day Hermione found herself literally being shaken. She really enjoyed it this time around, though. "Let's just hope Eleanor won't try to bring one home again," he said. "Dropped her off right after practice. She's going to have a field day with those poor gnomes."

" _After_ practice?"

"Wanted to see daddy boss around the boys some more. Rest assured, daddy delivered."

Hermione ejected a whiff of a laugh, but asked more seriously, "Any news about Vega?"

"It's not the torn rotator cuff we feared it would be, but he could still easily miss the rest of the season, I'm afraid. If we're lucky he'll be back for the last game or two, but I'm not holding my breath."

She sighed almost inaudibly, but Harry could feel it on the skin of his neck. "We really can't seem to catch a break, can we?"

"I think we're catching a pretty big one right now, my love," he said as he looked directly at her. "And I fully intend to never let go of it."

For a moment she got a bit lost there in her husband's emerald eyes, and she might therefore be forgiven for her impaired spatial awareness at that particular moment in time. "Whoa! Quick bathroom stop, please," she exclaimed about a nautical mile past the bathroom door. "I need to scrub the cat off my hands. He gets awfully _licky_ sometimes."

"Fair enough," said Harry, deftly making a U-turn. "Wait a minute, so earlier with your hand I was effectively—"

"Passionately snogging our sluggard of a tomcat, yes."

"Well, in my defense," he said as he gently put down Hermione in front of the girls' basin and in accordance with tradition went on to use the boys' basin next to it himself, "he is a rather handsome fella. Must be taking after his mother in that regard."

Indignantly the wife returned, "And what exactly is that supposed to mean, mister?"

"Come on, now. I loved Crookshanks, I did, but let's be honest here. He was never going to win a quadruped beauty pageant with more than one contestant, and even then it would've been a tough call."

Hermione, chin proudly raised, grabbed a towel in much the same way the Queen of England might during some nationally televised royal towel-grabbing ceremony. "Well, that's exactly why I chose him in the first place."

A dubious snort came from the husband. "You chose him because he attacked Ron."

The wife seemed unfazed. "Certainly no detriment to my assessment of his good character."

"Ron sends you his love, by the way."

The wife was officially fazed. "I am an awful person."

"And my favorite one at that." He gave her a big wet smooch on the cheek and, ignoring her playful and altogether futile protests, picked her up once more. Without further delay or disruption he carried her through the dim corridor into the light-flooded master bedroom that overlooked the sprawling meadows to the east, finally laying her down on their Victorian four-poster bed with utmost care.

"Darling," she fondly spoke to him as he gingerly retracted his arms from underneath her, "you really don't have to be quite so careful with me anymore. I won't break if you handle me normally again, I promise."

"Force of habit," he said with an apologetic smile, leaning over her. "Sorry. I'll get back to my usual wife-beating drunkard style in no time."

She laughed, then dreamily sighed, "The man I married."

Grinning, he gave her a peck on the forehead. "You go ahead and get comfortable, luv. Forgot to wash my face." He left his glasses on the bedside table and made for the door. "I'll be with you in a minute."

"Don't take too long," Hermione told him as she blithely appreciated his marvelous posterior moving unfortunately into the wrong direction, "or I'll be snoring like a Snorkack by the time you get back." His laughter reached her from the hallway as she contentedly began to rearrange the pillows which, as a matter of course, had only hours before been neatly arranged by none other than herself. Alas, the circle of life...

Harry, meanwhile, quietly shut the bathroom door behind him and stepped towards the closer one of the two sinks, despite it technically being the wrong one for either one of the male members of the Potter household. He leaned onto the cool white ceramic with trembling hands, legs largely steady still but knees not quite trustworthy. His eyes were shut, his head bowed so deep his chin was almost touching his chest. Controlling his breathing to calm his churning heart, he kept inhaling deeply against that tightness that seemed to be gripping his entire ribcage, releasing the air through his mouth and going through the motions in slow and steady cycles. Despite his best efforts he felt pressure building behind his eyes, but stubbornly refused to give in to it.

 _(I've missed you._

 _It's only been six days, really..._

 _Well, well, well. Look who's counting.)_

"The hell is wrong with me," he grumbled to himself, opened his eyes and stared down at the blue veins and twitchy tendons standing out on the back of both his hands. Supporting himself on their heels, he clenched them into white-knuckled fists, held them like that for a second and relaxed them again. He then repeated the process a couple of times, still consciously managing the rhythm of his lungs as he did so. He was not going on routine but on instinct.

"Will you just pull yourself together already, for crying out loud," he angrily instructed himself through gritted teeth. He had never had much of a proclivity for soliloquizing, but lately—well, for a quite a while now, truthfully—he had caught himself doing precisely that more often than he cared to admit even to himself, and always much to his subsequent embarrassment even when there was nobody around to catch him doing it.

 _(It's you. It's always been you. And I don't want to waste another year being apart from you._

 _So... are you saying we should just... move in together, or what?_

 _Yes._

 _Don't you think we're rushing our fences here a bit? … What am I even saying? Let's do this!)_

It had started during the times of Hermione's deeply unfamiliar absence, of course. That _absolute_ absence of something so substantial and fundamentally irreplaceable that wherever it is missing there's left behind the almost tangible _presence_ of an unfillable void: a materialized maw of _nothing_ that like a black hole out in the vast, cold expanse of space keeps devouring and obliterating whatever it touches, its bottomless blackness growing ever larger and ever more voracious...

 _(You know, every time you kiss me I feel like the universe will have to come up with something bigger than death to part us.)_

Without her, the girl-turned-woman that in the most real sense had never truly left his side from the day their friendship had been unbreakably sealed almost twenty-seven years ago, the house somehow had felt emptier than ever it could be without anyone inside at all. When during all those long bleak days and longer nights she was in the hospital and he at home, restless, helpless, useless, when she was _in there_ sedated, in pain, unconscious, in surgery, all on her own, and he was _out here,_ completely forlorn, cut off from her like that with no way of being with her, where he belonged, and taking care of ordinary things that made no sense anymore... that's when he had began talking to her with none but his own ears there to listen and only the silence between the walls to give answer. In houses without love and laughter there is no solace to be found, and thus in the most dire of moments _Hollow's End_ had once again struck him as no more than the ill-fated tomb of all his life's hopes. The house itself, he had felt acutely then, could not survive another loss.

 _(Hermione Jane Granger, will you marry me?_

 _Is that a rhetorical question?)_

Grim matters had made a turn for the worse when his daughter caught him once or twice, found her dad talking to her absent mom in some distant, unfamiliar voice: poor little Ellie all confused and disquieted by her dad's most puzzling behavior. She was in that uniquely odd spot in life's fleeting timeline where she was too young to truly comprehend what was going on with her mommy, yet too old to be entirely and so blissfully oblivious to it all. Garden gnomes she got—preferably in her hands, too—but her mother withering away in front of her eyes in an unpleasantly smelling hospital room with strange tubes attached to her arms and her nose, and not a hair on her skull-shaped head... well, that was all a bit harder to make sense of. Perhaps not exclusively within a child's mind.

 _(I'm aware this may not exactly be the ideal time for this, but I've been meaning to tell you for a couple of days now and I sort of suspect it would soon enough prove a bit difficult to keep this particular piece of information under wraps. Literally, kind of. Because, you see... I'm pregnant, Harry._

 _From me?_

 _Are you kidding me right now?)_

Harry had tried so hard to be strong for their little girl, to comfort her as best he could even as his own heart at times struggled badly on that thin, frail line between hope and despair.

 _(Mr Potter, I need you to understand what we're dealing with here. Your wife is seriously ill..._

… _seriously ill..._

… _and things will get a lot worse before they'll get any chance to get better..._

… _a lot worse...)_

And it had come so close to his heart... oh, how terribly close it had come! There had been times when all their yesterdays had seemed as distant as all their tomorrows seemed unlikely, when a morbid subjunctive had quietly crept into his thoughts of days to come and things not yet done. There had been moments, thankfully transient but gruesome nonetheless, when he hadn't been able to make out even the faintest spark of light at the end of the proverbial tunnel. Moments when against all his heart's wishes his mind had strayed in sickening flashes to the pernicious w _hat-ifs_ of himself left behind: torturous considerations of what he, a single father then, could possibly do to compensate for her unbearable, irreversible absence...

 _(I'm scared, Harry._

 _Good. Some in here are too tired to be scared any longer. You can see it in their faces, in that dullness in their eyes. And that's what frightens me the most. I need you to be scared, Hermione. Because as long as you're scared, you're still fighting. And I need you to fight your way back to us, you hear me?)_

They had almost, _almost_ lost her once in one critical moment, where a single human error would have led to fatal consequence. He had seen the excruciating scene unfold in his mind's most cruel chamber over and over again as he had lain alone in bed during dreadful nights. A vision from which eyes firmly closed could not shield him: the heart monitor flatlining, doctors and nurses falling silent as a professionally detached somberness takes the room... her lifeless body lying limply on a cold, sterile operating table... her wedding ring close to slipping off her bony finger as a white shroud is lowered over her gaunt and colorless, yet still so eerily beautiful face...

"Stop it!" he hissed, punching the apathetic ceramic with enough uncontrolled force to send a tremor of pain through his hand and up his arm, concurring with an instantaneous sting of shame in his brain. He cursed under his breath, and having come so dangerously close to ejecting a burst of equal pain and anger in a scream, he momentarily regretted his decision to refrain from turning on the water to drown out any noise he might make, doubtful though it was just how much that would have helped if he had started demolishing their bathroom furnishing...

 _(I'm afraid there are no guarantees in this, Mr Potter. Not ever, even now that things are looking up._

… _no guarantees..._

… _not ever...)_

With a groan of frustration he opened the mirror cabinet above the basin while rubbing his scarred forehead with his aching hand, the pain therein still throbbing but gradually subsiding. The sight presenting itself to him did little to improve his mood: bottles upon bottles of prescription poison. Countless concoctions of awful things intended to treat even more awful things. Pills meant to abate the adverse effects of other pills while causing an entire set of side effects of their own. A cabinet that was supposed to be used for toothbrushes and corresponding paste, dental floss and nail clippers, hairpins and cotton pads, face cream and an assortment of cosmetics, innocent odds and ends of daily hygiene, instead contained enough medicine to kill just about the entire population of Godric's Hollow.

 _(I'm no more than a burden to you..._

 _You carried me for seven years, my love. Let me carry you for a little while.)_

Harry absently shook his head as his eyes flitted over the countless plastic bottles and paper boxes and all those vaguely ominous names printed on them in straight bold letters, each of them just another way of spelling _disease._ It was high time they went about clearing out this pharmaceutical mess. Keep the aspirin, toss the rest. Hermione didn't need much of it anymore, and soon enough would once again require the mirror cabinet above the girls' basin to supply her only with cotton pads and mouthwash and the occasional tampon. The way it should be, always.

 _(In sickness and in health, remember?_

 _Till death do us part..._

 _Death, my dear, can sod right off.)_

Harry closed the cabinet and turned on the faucet after all. He leaned down over the sink and splashed his face with cold water a couple of times, running his hands over his face and cleaning out the corners of his eyes. It felt good, and he indulged himself for a moment longer. Then he turned the faucet off again and grabbed a towel with his eyes still closed, both his hands unerringly guided by the unconscious knowledge of his familiar surroundings. He pressed the fresh towel to his wet face, inhaling its flowery, kind of _Hermione_ scent as he came back up into an upright position. With a last, slow wipe from his forehead down to his chin he dropped the towel from his face and ended up staring at his reflection. He absentmindedly raked his fingers through his hair a couple of times, paying no attention to the result.

 _(My dearest Harry, the following are the most difficult words I ever had to write, and they shall only reach you in case of my_ — _)_

He turned away from the faint shadow of fear in the eyes of the man in the mirror, switched off the lights, casting the mirror and its infinite phantoms back into obscurity, and left.

Upon reentering the bedroom he immediately started in a conversational tone, "Any news from Jonathan?" and with that went straight for the wardrobe with his back turned towards the bed, just to buy himself a few more seconds in which to fully compose himself. He didn't like keeping any of it from his wife, but this, he thought, was not the time. He would tell her of the letter he had not been supposed to find and even his ill-advised basin punching incident eventually, but not today. She deserved to have today, and so much more. With just a pinch of good fortune more of the days ahead would be more like today and less like too many of the woeful days now behind them, supplying ample opportunity for such discussions and many more. But not today.

Not today.

"Yes, as a matter of fact," he heard Hermione reply. "Archimedes arrived just an hour or so after you and Ellie left the house. Woke up to the drumming of his beak against the window. A positively delightful percussive performance he naturally didn't deign to stop until I finally toddled over in a quasi-somnambulant state. The very moment I wrenched the window open, ready for some extensive early morning animal abuse, the little nagger got all fluffy and nibbled my fingers in that disarming way he does, rendering me utterly incapable of being peeved with him for even a fraction of the time he bloody well deserved."

Harry smiled at the mental images her rather colorful description of that blissful morning scene evoked as he unbuttoned his shirt, though Hermione of course couldn't see much of either smile or unbuttoning, which secretly she deemed unfair. "So how's life at Hogwarts this week?"

"All is well," she answered. "Or that is at least what I was able to gather from the three hastily scribbled lines our loving son demeaned himself to send our way. He had a bit of an altercation with a Slytherin boy earlier this week, but our esteemed Professor Longbottom intervened before it could escalate into some serious flyweight fisticuffs. Old family tradition, I suppose. Wouldn't you agree, darling?"

"On both his father's _and_ his mother's side, if memory serves me right."

"Indeed," Hermione concurred amusedly. "Sometimes I think I can still feel my wrist hurt a little."

"Hah!" Harry ejected. "Don't give Malfoy's jaw more credit than it's due."

Hermione giggled gleefully. "At any rate, where was I? I only covered one of Jon's three magniloquent lines so far. Ah, yes. Magic, it would appear, is generally considered _lame_ nowadays, and not being admitted to the Quidditch teams in first year _still_ sucks. Especially when you're the the son of the only bugger who ever circumvented the rule, I suppose. Sucks almost as much as not being able to google your Potions homework."

At that Harry gave a thorough chuckle. "The times they are a-changin', huh?" He put his shirt on a hanger with rudimentary care, swatted at it a little for good measure and finally stowed it away somewhere between its ilk. Then he went to work on his belt buckle to get out of his black chinos. "It all sounds rather boring, I must say. Where are all the surprise Halloween trolls and three-headed guard dogs? What about the rampaging basilisks and all the sinister schemes of evil death cults? Our boy's getting close to finishing his first year at that school, and not a single attempt on his life has been made. I'll have to write McGonagall a strongly worded letter of complaint about this. I expect higher standards from Hogwarts, honestly."

His wife's delightful laughter had him grinning from ear to ear within an instant. "I may shudder at the thought of two hundred smart phones illuminating the Great Hall and fourteen-year-old witches constantly posting their duck-faced visages on Wandstagram or whatever it is they do these days," she said, "but a perfectly _boring_ seven years at school for our children is a change of pace I'm all too happy to live with, thank you very much. Are you about done over there, luv, or do you require assistance with that particular sock of yours?"

He swirled around dramatically as he flung the last of his aforementioned socks into a random corner of the room. He wanted to make a funny, potentially even witty comment to nicely go along with it, too, but then something entirely different momentarily wiped any last spark of wit from his mind.

"You're naked," he observed in what for a grown man and father of two was remarkably dopey a fashion.

Hermione smiled somewhat impishly at him with her upper body supported on her elbows and her legs stretched out in front of her, crossed at the ankles on top of the duvet folded at the foot of the bed. She waved at him with her toes. "I _was_ hoping it would be noticeable."

"Yah," Harry barely managed to affirm the obvious in between gulps, and it was all a bit strange for a multitude of reasons, only some of which he was currently aware of. "Very notice-uh-babble."

Whether a day had gone by in the past two decades that he hadn't seen his wife naked or well-nigh so he could not say, but this was the first time in months that he was perceiving her in an unquestionably sexual context—a context she had deliberately arranged for at that. And Harry James Potter, aged 37, had absolutely no clue what to do about any of it, so he went ahead and retrieved his violently discarded sock from a lampshade instead.

"Well," Hermione went on to elaborate further on this exceedingly perplexing matter of unannounced marital nudity, "my original plan intended for you to be the one to help me get out of that dress, but then you told me to get comfortable and I didn't want it to get all crumpled." She looked at him expectantly. He stared back at her in a manner as far removed from meeting anyone's expectations as humanly possible, floppy sock still in hand, and so Hermione deemed it suitable to add in a measuredly sultry sort of way, "I'm _very_ comfortable right now."

At that the bumfuzzled husband narrowed his eyes suspiciously. "Just what exactly have you been doing all morning long with all those dodgy plans of yours?"

The wife, thereby very much caught in flagrante delicto, had just enough decency left in her wicked self to blush ever so slightly. "I told you my mind was in a perambulating sort of mood..."

"Uh-huh," a by now wholly sockless Harry replied as he at long last set about joining his scandalously unclothed wife in bed, himself not at all alleviating the rampant depravity in the Potter household by being clad in no more than a single pair of black cotton briefs. "I'm beginning to suspect that _Best Of_ you mentioned earlier wasn't quite as innocent as you led to me to believe."

"But it really was!" an affronted Hermione insisted, reclining back into the pillows with one hand just above her head and the other resting lightly on top of her belly button. "Mostly, anyway."

Harry, positioning himself on his side right next to her with his head supported on a loose fist, his pinkie brushing slowly back and forth over his mouth, raised one most skeptical eyebrow.

"I'll have you know that I was merely reminiscing about some of our best kisses, okay?" Hermione sprang to her own defense in lieu of anyone else to do it. "Totally sweet and innocent, befitting of a proper lady such as myself."

Harry's eyebrow discovered new heights on the forehead to which it was attached, which just barely was still his own.

"Well, surely you would have to agree," Hermione continued under this immensely stressful spousal scrutiny, "that the kiss that ultimately led to our _first time_ would be an obvious top ten candidate..."

Harry's wayward eyebrow relaxed and in its stead his lips curled upward, though not quite as high of course. "I probably would, yes. That was a good one. Including everything that followed after."

She couldn't help but smirk at him. "See how quickly the mind wanders?"

He chuckled. "So what else you got, missy? Don't tell me that's the only one you remember."

"Please! Not by a long shot." She paused for a moment to put her thoughts in order, because there generally were a lot of them. "I suppose our wedding kiss should be somewhere in the mix, although I personally preferred our wedding _night_ kiss, since with that pesky crowd finally out of the picture we could really go all in. Take it aaall the way, if ya catch my drift..."

Harry shook his head at her in stern disapproval. "It's impossible not to catch your drift right now, you know? What in Merlin's name has gotten into you, you saucy little minx?"

"Well, nothing as of yet," the minx casually answered, throwing a pointed glance right down at his crotch before meeting his eyes again. "But I'm still working on it."

Harry Potter's eyes soon resembled those of a kobold maki as he gaped at his wife, thoroughly scandalized. "Really! This is—I dare say—indeed, most inappropriate, my lady." The lady, meanwhile, was wrestling with a bad case of the mad giggles. "Verily, as it were. Shocked is what I am! Shocked, I say!"

Harry made a valiant effort not to be too obviously hypnotized by the rather salient motion of her breasts that all this excessive laughing caused, and faced with this brazen bedroom obscenity proudly jutted his strikingly aristocratic chin.

"Well, I for one would like to submit our very first kiss for the jury's consideration," he went on to declare quite haughtily. "You know, a kiss that was _actually_ innocent and that didn't lead anywhere except our shared future. It wasn't merely a prelude to something else, it wasn't just foreplay and it didn't end with all that carnal kerfuffle you seem to be so _hopelessly_ obsessed with, woman. It was a thing of itself, and it was pure and wonderful and more magical than any spell I've ever witnessed."

Hermione had managed to compose herself about halfway through his increasingly convincing presentation, her occasional titter notwithstanding, and by the time he reached his closing words was regarding him with rapt attention and a loving expression on her face. "Yes, it was," she agreed quite in earnest. "We honestly had no business kissing like that with zero experience."

"Indeed," he concurred, every last bit of intentional affectation gone from his conduct. "Then again, we always were a great team."

"The best," she pleasurably amended.

They smiled at each other, not for the first time in their lives in absolute agreement.

"What about _The Quidditch Kiss?"_ Harry offered after a moment's ponderous pause.

"Which one?" Hermione asked with a soft chortle. "I gave you a kiss before and after virtually every single match of your professional career. Oh, d'you mean the one after you won your first championship, when you came flying over to pick me up from the stands? You had to pay a fine too, remember? For a breach of safety protocols."

"Psssh, safety protocols!" Harry scoffed. "That kiss was worth every fine they could've thrown at me. But I was actually thinking of the one in the great deluge of '02 just now. Man, that game was the greatest battle I've ever fought that didn't include any weapons, and in the end... perhaps the most soul-crushing defeat I ever suffered." He chuckled quietly in a pensive sort of way, riddled with a distant and half-forgotten sadness. "Still haunts my dreams sometimes, that one."

Harry had taken his once so glorious Knights of Kernow to the European semi-finals for the first time in his career, already marking the club's greatest success in nearly a century. He had carried them on his back, fans and experts alike unanimously agreed. The team was widely deemed to have no business playing on that kind of stage, with a most apparent lack of talent they had—owing to some notorious mismanagement—struggled with for decades, which is why they had offered a certain someone who hadn't played a minute of real Quidditch in over eighteen months a professional contract back in '99. They took a chance on him because there was little risk in it for them, and he did bring a certain marketability with him that was still inextricably linked with his name. Eventually and after numerous improvements to the squad it would all pay off beyond anyone's reasonable expectations, netting them their first titles both domestic and international since 1911. But not on that painfully memorable day back in '02.

Hermione looked at her preoccupied husband affectionately, remembering with him nearly every last detail of that whole stormy mess of a day: that particular smell of grass and freshly painted stands, the faces of crestfallen fans and tears shed quietly in thunder and in rain. The match should by rights have never taken place that day, but the schedule had been judged too tight for the event to be delayed any further, and so they played. And Merlin, did they ever play! Hermione's sole source of interest in any sports had always been the boy who eventually became the man now at her side, but that bloody match on that diluvian day was one of the most intense experiences she had ever had, right down to its well-nigh unendurably dramatic conclusion and that devastating emptiness that settled in its wake.

The match had long ended and nary a soul had been left in the battered arena. The pitch had been utterly soaked, water the earth below could no longer absorb gathering on top of the grass in rippling puddles that came close to turning into a proper pond. And there in the very center of the impossible flood Harry had stood, his irreparably broken Firebolt, treasured gift of his late godfather, still in hand: a motionless silhouette behind translucent curtains of relentless torrents of rain. And she alone had come to him.

"That kiss was one for the ages, though," she said in a wistful whisper, smiling dreamily. "I still wonder where the hell Steven Spielberg was, because that was the most cinematic thing to never be caught on camera."

"You mean unlike the event that preceded it?" Harry cheekily challenged her. "You know, a competitive ball game which pitted two teams of airborne broomstick-riders against one another?"

"Eh," Hermione commented with unsurpassable indifference. "They can easily do that with CGI nowadays. They'd probably make the Quaffle explode every time a goal is scored. Quidditch by Michael Bay."

Harry's subsequent chuckle waned on a long and thoughtful sigh. "We had a pretty bad row prior to that, didn't we?"

"Oh, that's right. We hadn't spoken to each other for... two entire days, was it? Which is still our record."

Harry pondered over that for a moment. "Do you even remember what we were fighting about?"

"I could tell you," Hermione mumbled reluctantly, hiding half her face underneath her arm, "but I don't want to."

"Because it was entirely your fault?"

"Yeah, right," she scoffed at this most preposterous of suggestions. "As if that could ever happen!" They grinned at each other before she added in more serious a fashion, "It's just so utterly irrelevant, that's all."

And smiling still Harry simply replied, "Agreed."

His body so perfectly at ease next to hers, his mind did not cease roving, and he followed his gauzy, elusive threads of thought into a different corner of his dusty old memories.

"Personally," he shared what he uncovered, "I couldn't ever forget the kiss you gave me when you told me you're pregnant, either. Once I fully grasped what you were telling me, I mean. Took me a minute, I know. It wasn't as cinematic as some of our other candidates, but... it certainly didn't mean any less. Must've been, what, three days after my surgery? I was still so far away from everything, lying there in that ugly hospital bed with not a single good thought on my mind. Just going in circles around everything that had been taken from me, everything I had lost. Again left with nothing." He locked eyes with Hermione. "Or so I thought, idiot that I am. Until you pulled me back _."_ He flicked his fingers in the air above her chest. "Just like that."

She regarded him with an appreciative smile. "I would gladly take all the credit for that kind of magic," she said, "but it wasn't quite that simple, if we're being fair. You had a couple of rough months still ahead, and you threw yourself at this house and into the considerable amount of work that had to be done on it practically the moment you were released from the hospital, going completely against the doctor's advice—and worse, your wife's."

Only minimally abashed, he grinned in that lopsided way that would always make him look younger and perhaps more mischievous than he really was. The latter part was still up for debate. "Well, you could've just let me mope about and wallow in self-pity some more, you know, but you had to go all, 'Oi, by the way, mate, I'm all up the pole o'er here so where be my fancy shack at?'"

Hermione let loose a guffaw. "Yeah, that's _exactly_ how that went down."

"Aye," Harry tersely affirmed, teasingly tickling her belly button a little until she laced her fingers through his, half in defense and half for its own sake.

"You know," Hermione contemplatively picked up a thread of thought of her own a short while after, "I might as well add the countless kisses you gave me over the course of these grueling past months to the list, even though they may in sheer quantity ruin that top ten kind of thing we were going for here. But every deceptively casual peck on the cheek or the tip of my nose, every heartening kiss of my hand or the top of my head, every time your lips wordlessly communicated your boundless affection, your unconditional support, giving me all the strength and courage that I lacked, was so immeasurably precious to me. All of those, down to the most fleeting touch of your lips on my skin, and including the ones I cannot well remember for the enfeebled, delirious or even outright unconscious state I too often was in, are now my favorite kisses."

He met her gaze then and saw in her eyes the glistening harbingers of tears he could already feel welling up in his own at the mere sight of his beloved so vulnerable.

"I can only imagine how hard all of this must've been on you," she went on to let her heart speak, "and I know your own struggles, Harry. I know your demons, and I'll always be at your side to face them, for as long as I live. I'll fend them off when you're not looking. I know the way you sometimes doubt yourself down to your very core. I know of the weakness you cannot help but see in yourself. But Harry, my dear, through all of this madness you have been my lifeline. Yours was the voice that kept calling me back. Yours was the heart that kept mine beating when it was so close to giving up. You were the light that guided me through all this suffocating dark. You may falter as you carry me, but you do not fall. You _are_ my strength, Harry, and this you mustn't doubt."

Her voice wavered but didn't quite break, and she put a palm against his chest as if to steady herself on his sure and solid form. "I found it difficult to face Jon and Ellie sometimes, you know. I'm ashamed to admit it. I—I didn't want them to see me like that. At my worst, my weakest, my numbest. I saw the horror in their eyes as they stared at that cadaverous half-ghost of their mother, and they... they don't deserve these scars on their brave little hearts. I wanted to shield them from all of this, from myself in that most undignified condition. Once, only once I almost... almost wanted to scream at them to go and leave me be, leave me to waste away and die... and I'm so ashamed of it now, Harry. I don't know what came over me, what possessed me to harbor any such sickening thoughts. I feel like I—oh, I failed them as a mother, in so many ways..."

"Hey," Harry soothingly breathed against her, his tears flowing freely now as much as hers, and he engulfed her in his arms, holding her close to his radiating warmth. "Don't. Please, don't do this to yourself, Mione. You didn't fail them. You didn't fail anyone. None of this was your fault, and I know you know it because even I know it and you're smarter than I am."

He paused, once again inhaling that infatuating scent of hers. "God, I've blamed myself so much for not being able to fight this battle for you, for not being able to do anything of any use whatsoever. This was the one dragon I couldn't outsmart, the one nemesis I couldn't meet face to face, the one task I could not master. And all the while the life of the one I love the most, along with those two snot-nosed loin gremlins of ours," and there came something of half a sob and half a chortle from Hermione, "was on the line. And I was so agonizingly powerless... watching you, the brightest witch to ever walk the halls of Hogwarts, who can weave artful miracles at the tip of her wand, coming so awfully close to succumbing to so vulgar a disease. No ancient spell from dusty tome, no bottled cure of some arcane elixir could help us... and just like that, magic itself was disenchanted."

He emitted a labored sigh, his breath jittery on his lips as he clung fiercely to his weeping wife, whose hands were clasped together in the warmth between their bodies.

"You've always been the first to point out how... what's that word you like... infinitesimal a part of our lives is actually in our hands," he went on. "Nobody truly is the master of their fate, right? How much people cling to this illusion of control, because sometimes the truth is too hard to take. Well, it was damn near impossible to take for me this time around. It was easy in comparison when it was _my_ fate that spelled doom. When it's yours..."

He shook his head and planted a kiss on the top of hers. "And still we blame ourselves for everything," he whispered. "We did what we could with the hand we got dealt, didn't we? It was a pretty shitty hand at times, but look where we are now. Still in the game. Still going strong. And oh, you have no idea how strong you were even at your weakest. The way you marched through the entire ordeal. Those moments you mentioned? I think our kids didn't see them like that. Years from now they'll look back and realize how strong their mother truly was, going through hell and coming back to brush the dust off her shoulder. Coming back to _them._

"And you're right. They are the ones we're here to protect. They're the ones we need to be strong for, and I think we've done a pretty decent job at it so far. It's only in each other that we can face our own weakness and find the strength to beat it, and thus hold on to the strength we need for them. And that's what we do, you and I. That's what we've always done, and what we'll continue to do. For each other and for our children. Until we can finally kick them out of the house."

Hermione laughed even as her sobs yet persisted, and Harry joined her with the last of his tears running down the side of his face, soon to be all but forgotten. She put her lips against his chest, his stalwart heart beating on and on underneath them. She remained like that for a minute, feeling her own heart drop into the calming cadence of his. Perhaps it was the other way around, too. She leaned back with his arms still around her to look up at his beautiful face. Man that he was he'd always object to that particular adjective with reference to himself, of course, but to her it was true and he didn't get any say in the matter anyway.

"I love you quite a bit, did you know that?"

Harry smiled warmly, a playful twinkle in his eyes. "I've had a growing suspicion over the past twenty-odd years or so," he answered. "And by the time Ellie was born I was like, 'That clingy witch is just never gonna leave my digs, is she?'"

She rolled her eyes at him, grinning even as she did so, and he once again buried his lips in the fragrant locks of her hair to plant one more kiss on the top of her head.

"Another one for the list," Hermione mumbled against his chest, from which a chuckle rose in response.

"You really need to raise your standards for that list."

She was quiet for a moment, and Harry knew she was busy thinking because that's what she usually did whenever she wasn't unconscious. "Say, if you had to pick only one, out of them all, which one would be your favorite kiss of all? Our very best one?"

"Oof," Harry assessed the challenge quite aptly. "Just the one? That's tough."

"I know," she agreed. "Maybe we should take it down a notch with all that bothersome kissing business. I mean, seriously, we're approaching forty here. It's high time for our marriage to gradually disintegrate, anyway."

"Not gonna happen, silly," he determined, pulling her back against him in a tight embrace. "You're stuck with me, whether you like it or not."

Hermione heaved a despondent sigh out of her human straitjacket. "Fine, I guess."

And like that they were laughing in earnest once more, both of them together.

"Still," she soon went back to her pending question, "if you had to pick just one..."

"Phew," Harry exhaled, which really was just another way of saying _oof._ "Just gimme a minute here. I'll have to visualize and compare. Maybe reenact a little, too."

"We're only counting kisses on the mouth or in the general facial area right now, Harry," Hermione thought it advisable to remind him of the official rules, such as they were entirely made up by her on the spot. "No other body parts allowed."

"Aw, things were just getting interesting in my head..."

"You take your time, then. I'll just be over here waiting for the reenactment to commence."

And with the last faintly shimmering traces of tears fading away on their peaceful faces, leaving only vaguely persisting smiles in their stead, they shared an intimate and deeply soothing silence for a little while, Hermione still nestled up to Harry with his free hand moving gently, slowly up and down the side of her most familiar body, from the wide curve of her thigh and hip, through the dip of her slender waist all the way up to the back of her shoulder, and then again in reverse. When a pleasurable if not explicitly sexual moan eventually escaped from deep within Hermione's breast in appreciation of his ongoing caress, it was a bit like Beethoven's Ode to Joy in Harry's brain. The orchestra had a mind of its own, however.

"Say... Harry, darling," she began harmlessly enough, although a coinciding squeeze Harry felt at his left buttocks negligibly belied the apparent innocence, "I was wondering, just in a general sense, you know, to get a clearer picture of where exactly our weekend might be headed, so that I may prepare myself accordingly, whether, and I'm getting to the point now, you were at all planning on ever taking my numerous hints here—any one of them, really. Between tarting myself up for you and not wearing any underwear, polishing my legs to the point of making them look like sparkling guiding lines that all but state _'This way, please'_ , some highly sophisticated innuendos thrown in here and there for good measure, and finally awaiting you in bed completely starkers, I think you have a rather accommodating selection to choose from at your leisure."

Harry swallowed, then cleared his spontaneously rather constricted throat. "Yeah," he stalled for time as Hermione repositioned herself to be able to properly look the bloke in the eye, famously evasive not solely above a Quidditch pitch. "I've been a bit of a muppet here, haven't I? Don't worry, I did not suddenly relapse into eighteen-year-old me, who was fundamentally incapable of recognizing even the most blatant of sexual advances and couldn't have said what precisely constituted a flirtatious exchange if his life depended on it—which luckily it never did. So, uhm... yes, I did actually have a feeling you were... getting at something here."

She giggled. "I'm a wee bit relieved to hear that, I must admit."

He managed a strained smile, and the underlying apprehension did not escape Hermione's attention, which is probably why he went on to say, "It's just—I'm a bit... apprehensive here. I didn't know—" He groaned, already exasperated with himself. He _was_ relapsing into his eighteen-year-old self. Eighteen-year-old Harry Potter had been a nice enough chap, or so Harry Potter liked to think. Awfully daft, though.

"I mean, the last time we had sex," he purposefully set out anew, "was quite a while ago, for starters. Before you began your treatment, if you recall. Before... all of that. And we were both crying in the end, lying right here with our arms wrapped around each other in the dark and not the faintest clue what lay ahead of us. Knowing only that we likely wouldn't be together that way for some time. It was as if our bodies were saying goodbye to each other even as our hearts didn't understand why we would do any such thing. Goodbye for a little while. There was beauty in it, I think, despite its sadness. Or maybe because of it. But it's a tough spot to restart from. D'you know what I mean?"

She nodded, her eyes never leaving his face.

"And the thing is," he forced himself to go on with some palpable effort, "along with everything else... I really, _really_ missed you like that as well. Physically, I mean. Sexually. And that's hard for me to admit, because it's just so fucking embarrassing. Not missing you, of course, but—I mean, my spouse's in the hospital, clinging to that last fading spark of life that's in her, while I... well, I was here, some nights, feeling so damned lonely and missing you so much it hurt. And sometimes, occasionally, I couldn't help but think of you the way you used to be, and of the two of us together... and it burned me up inside. Until I found myself sitting here with a soiled tissue and a sullied conscience, feeling like some vile degenerate who can't control his stupid, primitive urges. And I was so bloody angry. Angry with the world, with life itself. Angry with myself, most of all, for being so fucking useless. Damn, maybe I should've given that potion a try I once read about back in school. Forgot what it's called. But I doubt some kind of Anti-Viagra would've made me feel any less pathetic. Bloody hell—"

"Harry," Hermione hastily interrupted him at that point. He had averted his face as much as he could entwined with her like that, but with one comforting hand at his cheek she gently guided it back to her. "My dear Harry, do you honestly expect me to judge you for any of that?" A ruminative pause. _"_ You really have no idea what it means to me to hear this most outrageous _confession_ of yours, do you?"

He had a look on his face that already stated plainly what the delayed shaking of his head merely underscored, and Hermione sighed and gave him a tender whiff of a kiss on the lips, which momentarily confused him even more. Some things never truly change, and when it came to these idiosyncrasies of her husband, Hermione was glad of it.

"Let me put it this way," she thankfully went forth to explain. "Being too weak to use the toilet without the help of my husband wasn't exactly a very flattering position to be in, to put it mildly. At times I wondered what keeping my life was worth if it meant surrendering even my last iota of dignity. You know better than anyone how fond I've always been of dignity. Great luxury to have, as it turns out. And then, on my first day home during that worst stretch, when it fell to you to take care of me the way so far only nurses who by now would most likely be hard-pressed to remember either my name or my face had done, and you were literally wiping my arse because I was too flipping weak to do it myself, the very first thought that shot through my constantly weary and drug-muddled mind was: _'Well, so much for our sex life. My husband is never again going to look at me with even a hint of desire in his eyes.'_

"Yes, I'm aware I just made that sound somewhat funny, but the truth of the matter is that for a while there, in those moments when I was at my very worst and looked like a walking corpse, it was a very real fear in me. The possibility that I would never regain my former self, and to lose you like that. To lose us and everything we were, or really just any single one of the numberless parts of us that I cherish beyond words. I couldn't accept that we would come out of this with less than what we'd had before. I wasn't ready, wasn't willing to give up even the tiniest part of us.

"And of course you didn't lust after me the way I looked then. Goodness, it would have been a trifle worrisome if you had, honestly. But to hear that none of it stopped you from thinking about me that way, from wanting me still in a past and future tense... that is incredibly valuable to me. So don't you be ashamed, my darling. There's no reason to. Not for you, anyway. I'm the grown woman who needed assistance on the potty here, so..."

He swiftly hushed her with a kiss of his own this time, their lips spreading into toothy grins even as they were pressed against one another. "Let's be done with it, then. No more shame between us."

"Agreed," she said, wrapping herself around him a bit tighter still. "No more shame."

They remained for a while in still and tranquil harmony, their wordlessness saying all there was to say and more. When after minutes of sleep's tender embracement slowly but surely surrounding them both Hermione's voice was heard again, it was—much to Harry's eye-opening surprise—an alluring purr.

"You know," she began, her fingers moving smoothly down the curvature of his spine, "considering all the _unspeakable_ things that have transpired in this very bed and elsewhere, I'd argue we surely must've stopped caring about shame a long, long time ago. 'Tis a silly concept for more pious folk than us, methinks." And as if to emphasize her point she sucked his bottom lip between her teeth before letting it flop back into place glistening with her saliva. Meanwhile, her hand had lithely wound its way from the back to the front of his pelvis, where it ended up cupping something. Firmly.

A gulp went up and down Harry's pipes. "Right," he concisely acknowledged the situation.

There was an arch smile on Hermione's adorably flushed face as she looked up at him while her hand was more boldly exploring its stiffening surroundings.

"I'm getting tingly," she observed in a breathy whisper, her eyes fluttering shut.

"Yeah?" was all he managed to croak.

"I haven't felt this in too long a time," she said, the pensive, downright analytical tone of her voice strikingly and quite amusingly at odds with the ongoing motions of her venturesome hand. "For months my libido was clinically dead. For weeks on end I was in a condition in which it was physically impossible for me to experience any such urges, and in the brief interludes between treatment cycles I was too utterly exhausted and sore to even consider acting on the faintest sexual impulse I might've had. I still thought about you, about us and our intimacy. I still found solace in those memories. But the hazy distance at which at times they appeared frightened me. So for all intents and purposes I was basically missing my ability to fully miss you in all the ways a human being can possibly miss another human being, in case I didn't yet seem clingy enough to you."

A light-headed smile took shape on his glowing features, and close to his as her lips already were she deemed it convenient enough to give him another kiss, just for how irresistible he was.

"I was so relieved to find these desires reawakening inside of me over the last couple of weeks," she told him, excitement now fully taking over the sober introspection. "And I can't even begin to put into words just how happy I was this morning, more than any of the incrementally improving days before, when I looked into the mirror and really, truly liked what I saw again. And that's when I knew that I wanted today to be the day. I felt ready, I was excited and I couldn't wait for you to come home to me."

Harry chuckled a bit clumsily, since Hermione's hand had not at all neglected its stroking activity. "And hence the lack of productivity."

She beamed at him in tacit and perfectly unabashed confirmation, almost as devilish as she was adorable.

"Are you—are you really sure, though?" Harry asked her, neither his hesitance nor his concerns entirely disposed of yet, although his tumescent erection was already way ahead of him. "Is this a good idea?"

"I have talked to Dr. Enys _and_ Dr. Harris about this," Hermione informed him, her hand reputably enough pausing in recognition of this serious and hardly tantalizing medical intermezzo, "and they both gave me their unreserved blessing. My mind's been getting there for a while now; my body was just lagging behind a bit. I needed some time to settle back into it, you know? To get in tune with it again. Or maybe the other way around. But either way, I really feel like it's all there now. My mind wants to, and my body finally gets it again. Which my mind is really happy about. There are no medical concerns anymore, and I don't think there's going to be any pain in our way. I, uh... ran some preliminary tests earlier. Nothing you wouldn't want to miss, don't worry. Strictly professional. Mostly. And if against my expectations there's even the slightest sign of discomfort, well, then you're gonna have one sexually frustrated wife to deal with."

"So I should keep the sedatives at hand then," Harry quipped. "Just in case."

A guttural chuckle came from her that Harry reacted to on a visceral level, and then it grew quiet again and they just looked at each other with Hermione's hand remaining in a rather incriminating place with its motions still suspended, waiting for something to happen. Sometimes, however, when nobody does anything, nothing does in fact happen.

"So you're sure," Harry stated flatly, obtusely even, causing both of them to laugh out loud again there amidst their pillows, and somehow, in that moment, it made them both feel twenty years younger again in the very best of all possible ways.

Then Hermione's expression slowly changed and her eyes as a matter of course captured his, the intensity of her arresting gaze boring into Harry with immediate effect, and there was an unforced sensual quality about it that no deliberate act of seduction could ever match. It was just her, utterly unveiled.

"Harry," she said quite simply, her voice at its lowest and most mellifluous, ensnaring him without affectation and without the slightest conscious effort, "I know you love me, and I know you still need me. But right now... right now I really need you to want me."

He met her blazing gaze unflinchingly, and there was no question that he was hers, all hers, as his fingers gently, lovingly caressed her rose-tinted cheek. And he was drowning, burning, perishing and born anew in the smoldering depths of her eyes as he lowered his parted lips onto her expectant own, making her his, all his, and when they finally met so again did their scarred yet still radiant souls, their many times tested yet forever undaunted hearts. Starved for each other over months of deprivation, their rekindled passion surged and soon soared. There was deep-felt tenderness in this intimate reunion of kindred spirits, but there was even greater hunger.

Hermione would later be unable to say what the hell she was thinking, why or even how she was thinking at all in that moment of erupting passion, with her entire body coming back to exultant life in the arms of her man with unbridled force, but in between moans of an unequivocally sexual nature she actually interposed with a mind so dizzy any coherence of either thought or speech was an impressive if entirely superfluous feat, "You didn't give me your answer."

A for various reasons understandably disoriented Harry came up from the nape of her neck with her long fingers still entangled in his hopelessly disheveled hair. With his brain taking a second or two to get a bare minimum of emergency neurons in order, his wildly unfocused expression was rather priceless.

"Our best kiss," she graciously enough elucidated her meaning.

He blinked slowly, looked lost for a moment longer, and then, quite abruptly, was all there with—judging by the enlightened look on his face—the entirety of the universe at last figured out, smiling that inimitable smile that a long, long time ago one Hermione Jane Granger had unwittingly fallen for years before realizing it was the person on whose face alone it could be found that she was irrevocably in love with.

"The next one," Harry James Potter then said to his wife, already closing that eminently unnecessary distance between their lips once more. "Always the next one."

And forth he went to prove his point beyond all doubt, for today, after all, was unquestionably a good day in Godric's Hollow.

 **~ The End ~**

* * *

 **Obligatory Footnote (you may or may not know the drill)**

• **Musical references:** This story's epigraph is comprised of the first couple of lines of the Beatles song _Here Comes the Sun,_ written by George Harrison and originally released on their 1969 album Abbey Road.

In addition, various other songs are alluded to over the course of the story. Specifically _School's Out_ by Alice Cooper (1972), _Space Oddity_ by David Bowie (1969), _I Got You Babe_ by Sonny and Cher (1965) and _The Times They Are A-Changin'_ by Bob Dylan (1964). Last but most certainly not least, the Ode to Joy, fourth and final movement of Ludwig van Beethoven's Ninth Symphony (1824), text written by Friedrich Schiller in 1785, is mentioned directly by name.

• **Literary Allusions:** Sprinkled in there somewhere, more or less subtle and on occasion slightly transformed references are made to Robert Frost's poem _The Road Not Taken_ (1916), William Ernest Henley's poem _Invictus_ (1888), as well as the novels _Ulysses_ (1922) and _Finnegans Wake_ (1939) by James Joyce.

• **People in space:** As of the moment of publication, the precise answer to Niall's question about astronauts—which, if we're being totally honest, Harry really should've known off the top of his head just like the rest of us—is 536, three of which only completed sub-orbital flight. (Amateurs.) 533 then actually reached Earth orbit, 24 traveled beyond low Earth orbit and a solid dozen walked on the moon, which makes this entire group of Muggles considerably more special than wizarding folk. Suck it up, ya wand-waggling weirdos!

• **Some serious Hollywood history:** Two movie directors of all but disparate repute are mentioned by name in the story above. One is Michael Bay, exalted auteur behind countless unforgettable classics of cinema and unparalleled milestones of the visual arts, such as _Bad Boys, Armageddon, Pearl Affleck_ and circa seventeen _Transformers_ movies. The other is that Spielberg guy. I think he made a movie once about a Jewish shark from outer space who stole the Ark of the Covenant and had a close encounter with some artificial Nazi dinosaurs on D-Day or something. I dunno.

• **Motto, motto on the wall:** In the unlikely case any of my esteemed readers should find themselves offended at Harry's rather biting comments about a particular kind of interior decoration: don't be. I'm aware being offended is quite en vogue these days, but there's really no need for you to join the self-aggrandizing frenzy. It is, after all, perfectly possible to be a decent person despite a thoroughly questionable taste in wall adornments.

• **About Longshanks:** In spite of (knowingly) naming their cat after Edward I, and their daughter (coincidentally) after the king's mother, Harry and Hermione are not intended to be thought of as the biggest living fans of Edward Longshanks. 'Tis a jest, no more. And maybe the household feline does in fact have unusually long legs which alone would warrant the name.

The question remains, however... could he actually be the biological offspring of Crookshanks? Was the latter still fertile? Was he castrated? What about all that half-kneazle business? How might that work genetically? Do they have barbed penises, too? And where's Mrs Crookshanks? Pray tell, how and when did they meet? How was their first date? Was it like _Lady and the Tramp,_ or more along the lines of _Fritz the Cat?_ Did they stay together? If not, how did Harry and Hermione end up with the litter of kittens? And where are the siblings?

Well, folks, all of this and more is obviously going to be the subject of my upcoming Miltonic epic poem in blank verse, _Of Claws and Shanks_ , focusing especially on the fascinating nature of penile spines. Stay tuned. (Please don't.)

 **Additional Acknowledgments**

This story would perhaps not have been outright impossible, but surely far more arduous to write without the constant accompaniment of the often tender, sometimes sweeping compositions of Brian Crain. He's subscribed to me on Spotify for some reason, too. He wouldn't be if he'd ever heard me rocking the Theremin, but that's beside the point. Check him out if you have a predilection for piano and strings. Or maybe just start learning the Theremin. It's about as close as you'll ever come to feeling like a real witch or wizard.


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